Science and Tech Museum has "suspended" collecting artifacts to save space
Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen
Updated: September 12, 2018
The Canada Science and Technology Museum has a plan to deal with its new, but undersized storage building.
The museum has stopped collecting artifacts, at least for now.
It is also reducing the size of its existing collection to free up space, donating items to other museums or selling them “as a last resort.”
The museum will move its collection — tens of thousands of artifacts — into the new four-storey storage building on St. Laurent Boulevard when construction is finished next year. The move will take two years.
Even before this $156-million building is complete, though, the museum says it is too small. It now refers to this structure as Phase I and it wants government funding for one or two more phases. It has also spent $80 million on the new “main” building next door, where visitors see exhibits.
“As part of preparing for the move, we are following international best practice and have suspended our collecting and lending activities for the next few years. Ingenium is also pursuing an ongoing Collection Rationalization Program, which, as an outcome, will increase available storage space,” the museum said in an email this week. (Ingenium is its brand name.)
Collecting and preserving the artifacts of our scientific heritage is a core part of the museum’s mandate, as laid out in the Museums Act.
An infrastructure report this newspaper obtained through access-to-information legislation showed the museum originally planned only to stop collecting large objects, but it would still be full by 2024 or 2025 through collection of smaller items.
“There will be no space in Phase I to acquire significantly large or oversized artifacts,” such as cars, the report says.
Now all collecting is suspended, with one exception: “Acquisition exceptions can be made for artifacts of national significance.”
However, the museum says future collecting will continue once it receives funding for a further storage building: “The Collection Conservation Centre (new storage building) will accommodate our collection with some room for growth. Once we have moved the collection into the new facility using compact, mobile racking and shelving, we will be able to determine the next steps for our long-term site development plan to meet future collection growth.”
There has been a long list of space-saving measures and cutbacks in the Collections building, some of them familiar to anyone with too much household stuff stored in the basement.
The museum plans to extend storage racks up near the ceilings and to narrow the space where people can walk to “maximize volumetrics.”
It has also cut out one elevator, reduced space for offices and meeting rooms and moved the loading docks outdoors.
The building is to be shared with the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Conservation Institute.
The museum is also raising the possibility of building a second phase even without government funding.
It says this “includes exploring options with the private sector to fund the construction of a second phase” by 2025. Museum spokesman William McRae added by email that, “We continue to look for partnership opportunities for spaces such as the digital innovation lab and a research institute which will complement the Centre’s library and archives, conservation labs and workshops.”
Today, much of the museum’s collection is in three rented buildings nearby. While these provide space, they do not have conservation laboratories and do not have proper environmental controls for sensitive artifacts.
Plastic artifacts, in particular, are in danger of deteriorating as time passes if they are simply left in storage.
What’s in the museum collection?
• Locomotives.
• Electric streetcars that ran in the early 1900s in Ottawa.
• Electrical generating equipment. The former Ontario Hydro used to have its own museum, but collapsed it and gave the collection to the Science and Tech Museum.
• Medical instruments. Early computers. X-ray machines once used by shoe stores.
• Cars. Farm Machines. Snowmobiles.
• Telescopes.
• The Nahma, a two-masted fishing boat called a Watts skiff, built in Collingwood in 1923.
• A triple-expansion steam engine built in 1945 that once powered a Canadian Coast Guard vessel. It still runs.
• A printing press used by the Shing Wah Daily News, a Toronto newspaper, since the 1930s.
• A Nash motor home from 1932.
• A SPAR Aerospace satellite.
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