Rehousing the Cyril Ruwald Collection
As part of the Total Asset Management project at the Powerhouse Museum the Cyril Ruwald Collection has been successfully rehoused in 2008. The Collection was originally housed in four large storage boxes with over 350 items per box. The entire collection has been relocated to a new 23 drawer storage cabinet designed specifically for the flat storage of plans and drawings. The cabinet, made of zinc coated steel finished with a high quality powder coating, has perforated drawers allowing for ventilation of the works. As part of the relocation process the individual requirements of each item were assessed and more fragile items including blueprints and drawings on tracing paper are being interleaved with archive text, placed in Mylar sleeves, or supported with archival backing boards as required.
A major reason for rehousing the drawings is to make them easier to access. With the drawings in the new plan cabinet, they are accessible by a single person without assistance. Previously, each drawing had been given a unique registration number which had been written in pencil on the reverse side, generally in the bottom left corner, and the drawings have been stored in numerical order. Consistency in numbering means that the drawings can be stored in such a way that the registration number can be easily identified and individual drawings found with minimal handling. This part of the project was undertaken by the Registration Department at the Powerhouse Museum. The Registrar's role in this project was to relocate the drawings within the museum's electronic cataloguing system (KE EMu) and to facilitate the movement of the drawings to and from the Preservation Department for treatment and photography.
Written by:
Analiese Treacy, Conservator
Anna Gray, Registrar
May 2008.
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