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The moving boxes are starting to fill up at the South Canterbury Museum on Perth St as next year’s big shift draws nearer.
Museum staff have begun packing and cataloguing the upstairs (mezzanine floor) exhibitions ahead of the scheduled move to the new facility on Barnard St.
Museum director Philip Howe said the packing effort was being led by museum co-ordinator Mel Rippin along with the weekend staff.
“They are currently decanting, which means taking out the objects that are currently on display, checking them, sorting numbers and putting them in a temporary holding area while we prepare for the new space.
“Not every single item on display is going to go across because we’ve got the opportunity now to reshape and bring in other stuff.
“So items that have been on display will either go across or they will end up going back into our store collections.
“While that is happening, our curatorial team which is Tony [Rippin], Chris [Rapley] and myself are working on text and layouts for the new cases and so forth at the new facility.”
Mrs Rippin said the upstairs pack up began at the end of the July school holidays.
“We start off with a list that’s been printed out, then everything [in each individual exhibition] has got to be cleaned as it comes off, then we check the numbers that are on the object against our list to make sure that we’ve got everything.
“We’ve got lots of different size boxes, so we look at what we’ve got, work out what size box we need, what we can put together and how we protect the stuff.
“The other thing we have to do as we’re doing this is the curators have gone through and they’ve highlighted everything they want to use in the new displays.
“So as we’re going, we’re separating into stuff that’s going across to the new museum and stuff that’s staying here to go into storage.”
So far everything had been accounted for, she said.
“There’s been a couple of odd things, but everything’s been able to be found.
“Just some things aren’t quite where you expect them to be.”
Mr Howe said it had been a bit dismaying to see how quick things came apart.
“It’s like packing up a set after a show.
“This is a very big show and it’s been running for quite a long time now.
“Every now and then I start to get odd feelings when I think about the idea of not having this building open as a public museum.
“I’ve worked in here for 37 years, most of my entire working adult life.”
While the upstairs was now currently closed, the rest of the museum would remain open until Labour Weekend, he said.
“We’ll make a bit of a do about it and host a few events.
“We’ll be celebrating both the winding down of the gallery spaces and by then it will also be getting very close to the 60th birthday of the [Perth St] building.
“We’ll then be closed for six months while we are busy packing up the downstairs exhibits and getting organised.
“We should start getting limited access to the new building towards the very end of this year and then full access in January, February next year and then we just go for broke because we’d really like to open in April next year.”
While the museum was closed over summer the goal was to still run some external events, he said.
“We still want to have some things available so the community especially, and some visitors to the region, have got stuff that they can do while they’re here.
“We won’t be running the full ‘Sunsational’ challenge that we did the last few summers, but we are going to have some events, possibly down the bay or elsewhere, which people can show up to.”
The Museum Development Trust had also recently launched a website to aid with fundraising efforts for the temporary exhibition space at the new facility, he said.
Anyone wishing to learn more about the new facility or make a donation towards the temporary exhibition space can do so by visiting scmdt.org.nz