The archives at the Creston Museum are getting a bit of a facelift.
Thousands of photos, newspaper clippings, maps, and much more have been collecting dust in boxes due to lack of space, but not anymore.
“We have been fighting for a couple of years with overcrowded storage space to the point where every time somebody brings in a photo, I think, this is a great photo, but where on earth am I going to put it?” says museum manager Tammy Bradford. “I’ve got no room left for photos, very little room left for documents, tons of room left for rolled-out maps that we hardly ever get in.”
Now, thanks to support from the Canada Cultural Spaces Fund, the Creston Rotary Club, private donors, and the Columbia Basin Trust, the museum can afford a solution.
“We’ve been working for a couple of years now to figure out what we can do about that. The solution is a high-density mobile storage system.”
Currently, there are aisles between shelves of the archive, leading to wasted space. Almost two-thirds of the floor space is taken up by the aisles needed to access the shelves.
The new system will have stationary shelves on either side of a middle mobile shelving unit.
“It will mean we can actually process and store the documents and photographs that we get. At this point, they’re stacked up in boxes because we don’t have anywhere to put them, so it will be huge. It means we can keep collecting all of these amazing documents that people bring in and it means we’ll be able to get at them and use them when we need them.”
“This will nearly triple our available shelving space, with absolutely no increase in our footprint or operating costs,” states Bradford in a release.
The archive can be extremely useful to many who call Creston home.
Bradford says they have used the archive to research families’ pasts, look at property history, and help with community organizations.
“We’ve connected a lot of people with their family stories and their community stories through the stuff that’s in the archive. So it’s just so exciting to know that we can properly take care of it going forward. And to expand a little bit about the archive itself.”
“It’s hugely important having those resources.”
Bradford says the archive also helps broaden Creston’s identity.
“How we got to be where we were, the challenges and opportunities we’ve encountered along the way, and how we responded to them. All of that is in the archives.”
Installation is most likely going to