The warehouse which holds the city’s historical wares

My name is Mariyam and I work as a Collections Support Officer at the Museum Collections Centre (often abbreviated as the MCC). The MCC is one of Birmingham Museum Trust’s sites and houses the reserve collections (those objects currently not on display) for all eight of our museums: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, ThinkTank Science Museum, Aston Hall, Blakesley Hall, Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, Sarehole Mill, Soho House and Weoley Castle. Our collections are so extensive that only a small proportion can ever be shown all at once.

The Museum Collections Centre.

When thinking of visiting Birmingham’s sites you can be forgiven for overlooking the large, unsightly, industrial warehouse that is the MCC. However it is within such an unexpected and inconspicuous venue that you can discover much of the city’s rich and notable heritage.

The warehouse inside the Museum Collections Centre.

The store, which sits just outside the heart of the city centre, is immense in size, measuring 9000m² across 3 floors, 4 stores and a vast warehouse space, which further contains 10 km of aisle upon aisle of storage racking.

Vintage cars inside the warehouse.

With approximately 800,000 objects spanning over thousands of years and an enormous breadth of artefacts, artwork, textiles and taxidermy that come from all over the world (and from just down the road) the stores tell a million stories.

Taxidermy cougar.

Since opening its doors to the public in 2006 the store has become one of largest most accessible collections centres in the UK. Not only providing a research facility for curators and academics but enabling a ‘behind the scenes’ look for community and school groups through a variety of talks, workshops and guided tours. We also hold special events such as our atmospheric Halloween Evening and two Open Days a year.

Staff at the MCC Halloween Evening.

To make your own discoveries come along to our next open day taking place this Sunday 18^th August  from 11am – 5pm (last entry 4pm). The theme of this event is animals and nature and families will love our visitors from Animalmania, Hatton Bug Zoo and the Falconry Centre. For more information visit www.bmag.org.uk/events?id=2552.

Falconry display at the MCC open day.

Alternatively book yourself onto one of our afternoon tours (last Friday of every month) – for information on bookings and access to the site please contact: Louise.Alden@birminghammuseums.org.uk.

To keep up to date with the MCC you can follow us on Facebook and look out for future blogs about the work taking place at the MCC from the Collection Support Officer Team.

Mariyam Ali,
Collections Support Officer

ICON HLF Intern in Preventive Conservation

Hi my name is Rose I am the new, ICON intern in preventive conservation at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and I will be here for 12 months. ICON (Institute of Conservation) gives people the great opportunity to gain valuable work experience through their internship scheme by closely working together with institutions such as Birmingham Museums Trust. These internships are funded by the National Lottery Fund.

My background, I have recently been awarded with the Masters in Conservation of Historical Objects from Lincoln University and with a degree in History of Art with Museum Studies. My practical work experience within conservation and the heritage sector is as a volunteer. I feel very lucky to have been given the opportunity by ICON and Birmingham Museums Trust to work as part of a professional team to gain some much needed work experience in the field of conservation. I am particularly interested in preventive conservation and collections care, because I believe preventing objects from damage should always be the first approach when dealing with heritage objects.

Being a preventive conservation intern I am involved in a large number of projects related to collections care. This means I am dealing with objects that are on display in the galleries but also objects that are in storage. For example one of my key roles is looking after the Hanwell environmental monitoring system that records relative humidity (amount of moisture held in the air) temperature and light, as any of these factors can have long term damaging affects if not controlled. My role in relation to this is to check the incoming environmental data for any abnormalities.

Rose checking the Hanwell environmental monitoring system at BMAG.

One of the most important aspects in preventive conservation is managing the environment that surrounds the objects. The environment can be broken down into relative humidity, temperature, light and gaseous pollution. Objects can be permanently damaged when exposed to an unsuitable environment; therefore it is crucial for us to understand the environment in our galleries and storage space. In order to do this we monitor and record the environment with electronic loggers that you may have seen in the galleries. These record the environment in 15 minutes intervals and send the information down to our main computer where I check them. If the environmental data shows anything unusual we need and go and check the galleries to see what could have caused this.

Video of the Rose monitoring the relative humidity and UV light levels in the history galleries:

When objects are not on display in the gallery they need to be stored in a stable environment for their long term preservation, so a big chuck of preventive conservation deals with creating suitable storage solutions. As an intern I have been given a project to assess the silver collections storage environment. Silver is quite vulnerable to gaseous pollution as it easily tarnishes, which can be quite disfiguring. Unsuitable gaseous pollution can be given off by various things such as other objects, made of other kinds of materials, in close proximity.

To see if there are any particular areas of concern in the silver store I have started to set up an environmental monitoring system that records relative humidity and temperature, as high relative humidity in collaboration with gaseous pollution can support tarnishing.  

The button loggers that record the temperature and relative humidity in the silver stores.

In January I will also place little samples of silver, copper and lead throughout the store to see if they react to the surrounding environment, which could indicate if there is a problem of gaseous pollution.  

Video of Rose explaining the environmental monitoring of the silver collection stores:

This kind of assessment can take up to a year and will be my main, ongoing project. Please check my blogs for updates on my progress.

Rosemarie Wachsmuth,
ICON HLF Intern in Preventative Conservation