Conservator

The Manitoba Museum houses hundreds of thousands of natural history specimens, and finding the space to put all them can be tricky, especially as our collections continue to grow with new donations and fieldwork finds. Only a fraction of the collections can be found on display in the galleries, and the rest are cared for in dedicated storage spaces. Finding a specimen in storage would be like finding a needle in a haystack if we didn’t have our handy tools: location and movement control!

In the field of collections management, location and movement control refer to a system of recording all the locations where objects are stored or displayed, and attaching those locations to a museum’s object record. This is often part of the collections procedures of museums, galleries, and archives, for the efficiency that implementing it provides, or sometimes for standard accreditation requirements.

At the Manitoba Museum we use a system of location codes recorded in our collections database. These location codes are in a standard format and attached to object records. It’s a two-way street: not only can we search specific objects and see their locations, but we can also search by location to get a list of all the objects stored there.

The database results for a search of location code “BC-10”, or, the Aquatic Insects case in the Boreal Gallery corridor.

The degree of precision used in this system can vary. We can record the room number, aisle unit, cabinet, and shelf number, or be even more precise with a box or bin number. Objects on the move can be assigned to transit records, like truckload or crate number. We can gauge how precise a location code needs to be depending on the kind of object, what collection it’s in, and how easy it is to find in that location. Information about who moved the object and when they moved it is also recorded alongside the location, so that an accurate and thorough movement history can be associated with it.

Keeping track of an object’s permanent location becomes even more important when you know that objects can be in temporary locations as well. Permanent locations tend to be shelves in storage rooms, but can also apply to objects permanently in the galleries. Temporary locations can refer to objects that are off-site, such as for outgoing loans, but can also refer to many on-site locations. Objects may need to be moved temporarily for short-term exhibits, conservation, preparation, short-term storage, or quarantine, and these spaces all have location codes that keep an object from getting lost, even while remaining within the building.

Utilizing location and movement control in the natural history collections means that we are able to store our specimens in specialized ways. Filing systems in collections storage can be based on taxonomy, age/stratigraphy, object size, catalogue number, special grouping, or a combination of these. The advantage to most of these systems is that they can enable browsing of similar collections material without jumping around to different areas of the collections. Location control works in the opposite way: to pinpoint objects among these complex systems, so that you can save time sifting through many potential locations.

From a broader perspective, location and movement control is also helpful for inventories, audits, risk assessment, and object history. Imagine a scenario where an object has been located, and it has some damage. By looking at the object’s record in the database, collections and conservation staff can see that at one point in time the object was being stored in a location known to have had non-ideal storage conditions, which adversely affected a number of objects in the same way. If staff kept good records about its movement from the old location to the new location, this object’s damage could be traced back to the period of time when it was stored there. With the help of dated condition reports attached to the object record by conservation staff, we can even corroborate the cause of the object’s damage to its previous location.

However, if there is a gap in the record so that the location history of the object in this scenario was never updated to the new location, collections staff can ask questions like: Should this object be returned to the old location listed in the record, if that location was the cause of damage for this object? Is the place that I found this object meant to be its new storage location? If so, who authorized it to be moved here and when? What is the current location of other objects moved out of those poor storage conditions, and should I relocate this object to the same new location as them? As you can see, location and movement control is just one piece in the ever-evolving puzzle of proper collections management.

For a long time, the natural history collections at the Manitoba Museum didn’t have the resources to implement location codes more precise than storage room level. This can make it difficult to find and track where specimens are located. Without precise locations, we rely only on cabinet labels and general knowledge of the room layout. Unfortunately, these could change over time and misrepresent locations if not updated promptly, or may not take into account special storage conditions that require objects to be in different locations than expected. A specimen could even be on permanent display in the galleries, but if that information is not attached to the object record then collections staff could spend a lot of time looking in storage for something that is not there.

Over my last two years managing the natural history collections with our brand new database, I’ve been working to add and update location information to as many natural history specimens as possible. I can do this by making inventories, incorporating location information into cataloguing procedure, and updating a record when an object is accessed for research, a loan, or an exhibit. This important work helps make accessing all areas of the collections a smooth process for collections staff, conservators, and curators.

At the Manitoba Museum, our Natural History collections mandate requires that we focus our collecting efforts on specimens that are from Manitoba. We do occasionally make small exceptions to that rule, especially if the specimens were originally collected or acquired by a Manitoban, like the spectacular tropical butterflies that we keep in the collection for occasional use in exhibits. Long-time museum fans may remember the spectacular Colours in Nature exhibit from 2011, where many of these were on display. In 2022, however, we made a big exception. A huge exception. An exception so enormous that the last time we moved it, we needed five people working together just to shift it a few feet to the left. Friendly Manitobans, it is my pleasure to introduce to you mammal specimen #24503, the left-side dentary bone (lower jaw) of a fin whale!

One end of a dentary bone from a fin whale, collected in Newfoundland.

Balaenoptera physalus, the fin whale, is a species of baleen whale that is found both north and south of the tropics in ocean waters around the world. Individuals of this species can grow to be incredibly large, second in size only to blue whales. As with other baleen whales, they sustain their large bodies by eating massive quantities of smaller organisms like krill, fish, and even squid. While Hudson Bay is home to several whale species, the fin whale is not one of them. So how did this jaw get to the Manitoba Museum? Why do we have it in our collection? And just how big is it, really?

The University of Manitoba, looking to free up some space in their storage areas, offered the dentary to The Manitoba Museum in 2022. We accepted the offer, thinking that one day it may make a nice exhibit piece. The bone was loaded into a moving van for a short trip over to the Museum where we catalogued it and brought it into our collection. The dentary now lives in our dedicated storage space for oversized Natural History specimens, alongside taxidermy mounts of bears, bison, and other big animals.

The question remains, just how big is this whale jaw, anyway? While we don’t have a weight on file for this bone, it’s been measured at 3.3 metres long from tip to tip, and 3.5 metres if following the inside curve. To put that into perspective using other things that can be found in our collections room, that’s the equivalent length of…

While researching William Pruitt for this piece, I came across a short biography for him on the Manitoba Historical Society Archives website. While it doesn’t fit nicely into this story, there are details about how before his brief tenure in Newfoundland, he worked for the University Alaska at Fairbanks in the 1950s. At the University of Alaska, Pruitt was tasked with researching from an ecological perspective the risks of Project Chariot, which was a plan to use six nuclear bombs to rapidly excavate a new resource export harbour on the Alaskan coast. He roundly condemned the plan for its environmental risks, and the report’s release was suppressed by the United States government. The University of Alaska terminated Pruitt’s employment over the issue, putting him on the road to Newfoundland, and eventually, Manitoba! In the end, Project Chariot was shelved due to objections from the local Inupiaq people and a subsequent wave of coordinated public outrage in the United States.

Learn more about William Pruitt – Manitoba Historical Society

Learn more about Project Chariot – Wikipedia