Visible storage is a method of maximising public access to

museum A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...

and

art collections A museum is distinguished by a collection of often unique objects that forms the core of its activities for exhibitions, education, research, etc. This differentiates it from an archive or library, where the contents may be more paper-based, repla ...

that would otherwise be hidden from public view. Many museums and galleries have over 90% of their collections in storage at any one time and the technique has been widely adopted recently by institutions ranging from the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

in New York, to London's

Victoria & Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...

as well as in many smaller collections. Visible storage cases tend to be densely packed and with less explanatory material than in conventional displays. In addition, they may exceed head height making smaller objects difficult to see. The cases are often located in spaces that were previously unused or unsuitable for conventional display cases. The cases may be curving, cylindrical, packed closely together or positioned down the centre of existing galleries. Claimants to have originated the idea include the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in the 1970s and the Strong Museum in Rochester, in 1982. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was one of the first large institutions to use visible storage when it created the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art in 1988 and the Victoria & Albert Museum has recently adopted the idea in their

ceramics A ceramic is any of the various hard, brittle, heat-resistant and corrosion-resistant materials made by shaping and then firing an inorganic, nonmetallic material, such as clay, at a high temperature. Common examples are earthenware, porcelain ...

galleries.Transforming the Ceramics galleries: an exercise in restraint
by Victoria Oakley & Fi Jordan in ''Conservation Journal'', Spring 2009, Issue 57. Victoria & Albert Museum, 2009. Retrieved 22 December 2013.

References

Collections care {{museum-stub