Doors Open Day at the National Museums Collection Centre

By Wendy Turner, Head of Collections Services

On Saturday 22nd September a happy band of museum curators, conservators and collections managers led groups of visitors around the National Museums Collection Centre as part of Doors Open Day 2012. In preparation for this I was asked to show STV reporter Laura Piper around the site. You can see the report from the day on the STV website here.

Doing that visit got me thinking about my job and led me to declare “I’ve got the best job”. In my new role as Head of Collections Services I am based at the Collection Centre and this means I am surrounded by millions of fantastic objects and specimens and work alongside an incredibly talented team of people.

Wendy shows off some of the shoes in our collection at a previous Doors Open Day.

At the Collection Centre we research, conserve, preserve, and photograph the collections, preparing them for exhibitions at our other sites and for lending them in Scotland, the UK and internationally. Our excellent facilities enable researchers and visitors from across the world to come and study our collections.

Since the mid 1990s we have been developing the site, constructing state of the art buildings to house our collections in. Most recently we constructed a new building to house the collections that had been stored in cramped and challenging conditions in the basement of the National Museum of Scotland. We’re now working on designing another new building to house some of our collections which are currently stored off site. This work supports us in regenerating our displays and is helping us to improve access to our reserve collections.

I’ve worked for National Museums Scotland for over twenty years and as I say in the video every day is different and that’s why I think I’ve got one of the best jobs in the country.

See photos from the day and hear Wendy’s commentary in the video below, reproduced here with the kind permission of STV.