University of Copenhagen Geological Museum

Transcription

[ background music ] >> In my opinion this is quite an unusual move procedure for a museum. We were very short of time when we were told that we'd need to be out of the old space and pack it. There's about 68,000 specimens in the collection. It took about three months to pack up the museum in the Darwin building and we had specialist museum packers to work with us so it's not just a case of getting a man in a van and sticking it in. [ music ] The space we've got now is much bigger. It's also got a big central space which we can use for teaching, public events and meetings, really anything which we didn't have in the old spaces. Also significantly larger in terms of display cases. Being a former library the whole room's lined with bookcases. [ music ] Because we've got so much more space it really, actually was a fairly unplanned process in that we'd unpack a box and decide where it goes and every case on the wall is a different size and height and width so it'd be really hard to plan anyway cause you'd have to measure the footprint of every specimen before you planned it so it was almost entirely unplanned. We've always had on display a tray of dodo bones; it's a fairly large collection so it's a tray of bones but it's actually significant. Some things that we were really worried about we looked after. That's actually known as Elky: it's a giant deer skull and antlers, nearly three metres across. He's very difficult to pack and we didn't know quite where he was going in the new museum so he's caused some problems but he was the last thing to come in but he's fine now. [ music ] The museum is mostly arranged taxonomically, so every animal is displayed with its relatives but with some of the new cases, the book cases, we've done some other things, so we've got 10 of the cases that we're calling question cases and each of these cases has an iPad attached to them and museums haven't used iPads in this way before so it's kind of testing technology. The museum has been taking shape slowly and slowly and slowly since we took over the space in November so it's only taken five months to bring everything in. We were mostly unpacked by the end of January; it's very exciting to see it. It's an old Victorian collection with nice cutting edge technology doing new things. [music]