Collections Care and Conservation

We carry out a lot of different tasks as part of Collections Care and Conservation. But none of it would be possible without our wonderful team of volunteers. Since we moved out of the Museum (for building works), with the last items leaving in March 2025, we have processed several hundred items through our conservation process.

The Conservation Process

First, items that have organic components sit in plastic boxes in the Quarantine Area for 2-4 weeks. This ensures that any insect pests or mould spores that may be present have been kept cool and dry and won’t be active when we begin to clean them. For simple organic objects, we can freeze them in our industrial freezer to kill off any living pests, but this is not suitable for a lot of mixed material or fragile objects.

Next, the volunteers complete condition surveys of every item. This includes measurements, identification of marks where possible and sometimes even little sketches, as well as an idea of what may need to be done to the object. This might be as simple as “dry clean with a smoke sponge” or much more complicated and “in need of repair by conservator”.

Then every object is treated in accordance with that condition survey. Simple treatments are undertaken by volunteers who know how to dry clean, wet clean, rust treat, rehydrate wood, rehydrate paper and some know how to do very simple Japanese tissue repairs under conservator Mary’s expert guidance. More complicated treatments are done by Mary, as a qualified museum conservator, or sent off to other conservators with specialisms. We are very lucky that Mary is trained in a wide range of object types and repairs, so that happens infrequently!

Our Collections Database

Once the cleaning is done, the items have a custom-made box formed by volunteer Chris using museum-safe acid-free materials. And then these need to be shelved, labelled and located on our computer database by Collections Officer Eleanor. Volunteers like Patty have undertaken specific tasks, such as going through over 700 wax seals by hand and matching them with their individual numbers by sight and locating them in the handmade trays, cut to keep each seal safe and not snapped!

The next step will be going through and digitising every item so we have clear, colour-accurate, scaled images of every item from every angle. But that will be a mammoth task and we will need computer-interested volunteers to help!

If anything mentioned above seems like something you would like to get stuck into, then our conservation volunteers come in on a Tuesday and take part in all aspects of museum object care. We encourage you to get in touch with Eleanor at eleanor.chadd@sgsoc.org if you have any questions or would like to arrange to drop in to have a go, particularly with digitisation!

• When someone offers us an object, we consider it at the Collections Committee and come up with a rationale for why it does or does not fit with these aims. We then send a list to the overall Society Council to advise accessioning or not based on that rationale. Read more about how we select which objects to accept here.