ULSTER FOLK AND TRANSPORT MUSEUM

The day before the conference ICON had organised tours around various different museums, I chose the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. This was set to a packed day fitting in several museum spaces and behind the scenes storage facilities.

The Folk Museum is a living museum where staff wear period costume and carry out demonstrations for visitors. As they are often open to the public whilst cleaning is being carried out, the house keeping team have come up with an interesting solution sourcing period appropriate brushes, cloth and buckets, and decanting cleaning products into glass bottles. This way cleaning of the spaces can be maintained, the products used blending in with the historical objects and properties, helping to reduce the potential for pest issues. We also got to experience a demonstration on one of the looms illustrating the expansive knowledge and dedication of their staff.

An introductory video at the Transport Museum created by local school children helped illustrator how the museum is actively engaging the local community and young individuals on how to look after museum objects. The tour around the space gave us further information on how the large objects are moved and particular case studies of interest.

Lastly was a look at the storage projects currently in action. A whole building has been dedicated to the storage of map plans and further storage has been created to house more of the transport collection resulting in a major audit of the collection. One interesting aspect was their experience with types labels. Finding them to fade and fall off, this has resulted in them producing A5 print outs of object info, laminating and attaching to the objects with cable ties.

As you can tell, a lot was covered in just one day!