Storage room at the Louvre Museum, Paris, France (photograph by Richard McGuirk, via Dreamstime.com)

The result of storage for museums is the metaphorical elephant in the room. It takes upwards a lot of space, only museums feign its absenteeism. Some museums have taken defensive action moving collections out of the chief site or creating tokenistic open up storages. Simply bloated by acquisitions and bequests, most big museum collections only keep to grow. The issue of storage needs urgent action.

Many of the objects in collections are consigned to storage because they are fragile or sensitive to light or humidity. There are also damaged objects, copies, and objects whose attribution or provenance is in question. The justifications for retaining these objects (in storage) are rather weak.

Take the British Museum for example. Just lxxx,000 out of the viii million objects in its collection (around 1%) are on public display and less than 4000 objects were loaned annually on an average. In 2014, when it publicly released its new edifice development plans, the report revealed that only 23% of the space was occupied past galleries while 60% of the space was used by back-of-firm, including storage. Since and so, the museum has announced plans for a £64 1000000 project to set a new xv,500-square-meter storage facility exterior of London. The approach, autonomously from being a questionable capital outlay, is not in sync with the times.

Visual storage at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England (photo by Sarah Stierch via Wikimedia Eatables)

Museums should downsize storage for commercial, environmental, social and ethical reasons. Post-pandemic with their revenues ravaged, they need to accept a hard expect at the stock-still and hidden costs of storage and weigh information technology against its academic objectives. They must do so empirically, assessing on a case-past-instance basis which objects were actually utilized for inquiry, conservation, or loans in the recent past without bending to curatorial whims.

Museums facing these issues could have a leafage out of Indianapolis Museum of Art's drove ranking project which graded their works based on their cultural value from A to D (A being indispensable and D being dispensable).

With growing calls for repatriation of colonial era objects and against illegal trafficking of antiquities, hiding them away from public view in a sleeping accommodation of secrets is doubly unethical. Museums in the futurity will find they must place their physical objects on loan to other public museums or repatriate them for the greater good. Also, museums with their legacy infrastructure have much to do to lower their carbon footprint, and harboring large parts of their collection in storage nether costly temperature and humidity controls while underutilizing them again makes them culpable on multiple counts.

Ultimately, rethinking storage is non about deaccessioning alone; it starts with stringent acquisition policies, fabricated transparent by comprehensive disclosure about the objects' provenance and kept unbiased through periodic review involving tertiary party experts. In cases like the Smithsonian where artefacts and specimens in storage closely supplement displays, enabling public admission is also necessary. Museums demand to realize that now is their best gamble to address the event proactively, otherwise their paw is likely to exist forced in the near futurity.

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Anindya Sen is an art writer and consultant who likes to explore themes and issues at the intersection of fine art and technology, culture and heritage and emerging artists and ecosystems. You tin can follow him... More by Anindya Sen