Exhibition maintenance

In April 2001 the new Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde (National Museum
of Ethnology) in The Netherlands was opened with about 3000 objects
on permanent display, representing about 2% of the total museum
collection. The objects are displayed by cultural area and represent
cultures from all over the world. The exhibition rooms are set up
with controlled environmental conditions including low light levels
and without the use of any off-gassing materials. Nevertheless there
are light-sensitive paper and textile objects which shall be
exchanged on a regular basis. In each of the different cultural
areas there are between 10 and 80 objects which require replacement
regularly. We are now starting to set up an exhibition maintenance
scheme which will include the planning of the exchange of the
objects as well as cleaning of the exhibition space. We plan a
rotating system for the paper and textile objects that will permit a
display of about 6 months per object over a timespan of 5 years.

We would be very interested to hear of exhibition maintenance
programmes in other museums and what the experiences are regarding
the effectiveness and feasibility of such programmes. What do other
museums regard as an acceptable exposure time for light-sensitive
materials?

We also saw the following book review in the last JAIC, "Exhibit
conservation guidelines" by T.Raphael and are hoping to be able to
purchase the book soon.

Margrit Reuss
Objects conservator
National Museum of Ethnology
The Netherlands


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 15:20
                 Distributed: Tuesday, August 28, 2001
                       Message Id: cdl-15-20-010
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