Collections Information Upgrade Project

Behind the scenes at London Museum’s current site at London Wall, over 500,000 objects are kept in storage. In the coming years, the museum will be moving to the new museum at Smithfield. Before we can move, all the objects currently kept in storage need to be audited, photographed, barcoded and packed, and we need to ensure the information in their records is accurate.

This gives us a unique chance to rediscover every item currently within the stored collection, from Dress and Textiles to Paintings, Prints and Drawings, and Printed Ephemera to the vast Social History collections.

This important project is fundamental to the preparation and delivery of a new museum for London. We will be expanding our knowledge of our collections, ensuring that all objects can be used to their full potential in the new museum. This is a unique opportunity to quality check the documentation and storage of our objects, but also to rediscover hidden gems and shed light on lesser-known areas of the collection.

Our Project Team are working through every store at our current site at London wall, locating every single object and ensuring they have accurate database records with all of the required information. The team are also photographing each item before packing and barcoding them – ready for the move to a new building.

This work enables us to know more about what’s in London Museum’s collection, and will allow us to fully engage with objects that have been in storage, sometimes for decades. At the end of this project we aim to have a better understanding of our collection and all object records will have excellent levels of information.

This improved knowledge will enable us to create fantastic content for the new museum. Not only will this allow us to create content within the museum itself, but also provide the opportunity of placing a huge wealth of the collections online, viewable to even wider audiences. The audit and barcoding of the collection is also essential to ensure that we move our collections accountably, safely and efficiently.

Each store is different, some contain a large number of objects and others contain large objects. For instance, there is an estimated 80,000 objects in one store, in comparison with 320 in another. Some objects are small sheets of paper and others are large paintings that are 3 metres long and weigh 50 kilograms. So, auditing each collection introduces a different set of challenges.

We began with Prints and Drawings in 2017, and all 18,000 objects have had their records improved. They have been photographed, barcoded, packed and are ready to move. We are now actively working in all other stores at London Wall and the team of Project Assistants continue to work with many interesting, unusual and amazing objects. They have recently been focused on decanting and packing up the 10,000 objects from the London Wall galleries.

The project is helping to ensure that we have a solid foundation to draw on when using our collections in the future for a whole range of activities, including research, gallery installation and digital communication. This gives us the opportunity to make our collection more accessible to the public and make thousands more objects available online.

This work is a crucial part of transforming ourselves into a new type of museum for the future and to ensure we create a world-class museum for London.