Collections
Our Collections work involves the display, care, study, storage and cataloguing of the designated collections we are responsible for.
At the Yorkshire Museum we launched a new Community Archaeology project aimed getting communities more involved in their local museums and collections. The first event to take place involved York College students working with our artefacts to recreate Roman hairstyles. Funded by Renaissance Yorkshire, a partnership of museums, libraries and archives, the project is based and co-ordinated from York, but also involves North Yorkshire County Records Office, Scarborough Museums and Galleries and Wakefield Metropolitan District Council Cultural Services.
The museum is also the lead partner and host for the national Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) in North Yorkshire and Humberside. The scheme encourages people to bring in objects they have found to be identified. During the year we led the way for the PAS approach to recording finds at large scale metal detecting rallies, and were congratulated by the National Organiser at the British Museum. Our staff attended two rallies recording over 400 finds and dealt with nearly a thousand metal detectorists, including a site at Thornborough, a highly sensitive Neolithic landscape.
There was great progress on recording information about the geology and archaeology collections over the year. Several volunteers have assisted with this work.
At York Art Gallery, a highlight of the year was the launch of a colour book featuring all the paintings owned by public museums and galleries in North Yorkshire, of which York’s collection was the largest. Published by the Public Catalogue Foundation, it went on sale in our shop and proceeds go towards the care of our paintings.
Over 4,000 works on paper were catalogued with support from the Paul Mellon Foundation, and the WA Ismay collection of ceramics now has over 1,800 of the 3,000+ works catalogued. The Japanese prints in our works on paper collection were documented for the Art in Life exhibition. Ceramics housed at the Yorkshire Museum were moved to one of our outside storage bases.
At York Castle Museum, the development of Kirkgate gave us the opportunity to re-catalogue and photograph all the items on display in the street, a huge undertaking which has improved our computer database.
We also closed one of our social history stores and moved the collections that had been housed there to our main depot.
Click on New Acquisitions or Documentation Plan for more information about new additions to the collections and progress on documentation during the year..
Japanese prints which were documented for the Art in Life exhibition.