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Training
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Online Museum Classes
Description:
The building and storage furniture are your first line of protection for the most valuable asset in your museum - the collection. Museum Storage Facilities and Furniture concentrates on building systems and furniture for storing and protecting collections. Topics include environmental controls, insulation, floor coatings and predicting space requirements. Museum Storage also compares commercial and homemade furniture and provides a blueprint for planning the redesign of your facility. Storage philosophy, construction requirements, safety and security and planning. A unit details how commercial museum-quality cabinetry is constructed. Blueprints are provided for high-quality, homemade cabinets.
Course Outline:
1. Storage Philosophy
2. Agents of Deterioration and Preservation Planning
3. Storage Facilities
4. Storage Furniture
5. Conclusion
Logistics:
Participants in Museum Storage Facilities and Furniture work at individual paces through five sections. Instructor Helen Alten is available at scheduled times during the course for email support. Resources include forums and scheduled online chats, PowerPoint lectures, reading materials and lecture notes and links to relevant web sites.
Museum Storage Facilities and Furniture runs four weeks. To reserve a spot in the course, please pay at http://www.collectioncare.org/tas/tas.html If you have trouble please contact Helen Alten at helen@collectioncare.org
Student Comments for MS202: Museum Storage Facilities and Furniture:
The content was perfect for what I was looking for. Though my class participation as minimal, the materials and information are here, there are links and lots of jumping off points that provide direction in areas I'm more interested in, and I can interact as time permits.
I liked the course content, the online nature of the course, the online chat and the self-paced work. I also liked the upload feature and the ability to re-submit after uploading for a period of time. . I would rate my online experience as a 10
I like that the material is at accessible, and I like being able to look ahead, or review the materials without having to go two or three places (book at home, papers on desktop, lessons in a deskfile). I like the journal feature.
I appreciated how thorough the information in the lectures were and enjoyed the slides which gave "real-life" images.
The chats were the highlight of the course - great to have give-and-take with colleagues and an experienced conservator like Helen. I felt like my specific questions were answered.
I really enjoyed having all the extra readings and references. I truly feel I can use those heavily in the future. The chats were very useful for having some questions answered.
The Instructor:
Helen Alten, is the Director of Northern States Conservation Center and its chief Objects Conservator. For nearly 30 years she has been involved in objects conservation, starting as a pre-program intern at the Oriental Institute in Chicago and the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. She completed a degree in Archaeological Conservation and Materials Science from the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London in England. She has built and run conservation laboratories in Bulgaria, Montana, Greece, Alaska and Minnesota. She has a broad understanding of three-dimensional materials and their deterioration, wrote and edited the quarterly Collections Caretaker, maintains the popular www.collectioncare.org web site, lectures throughout the United States on collection care topics, was instrumental in developing a state-wide protocol for disaster response in small Minnesota museums, has written, received and reviewed grants for NEH and IMLS, worked with local foundations funding one of her pilot programs, and is always in search of the perfect museum mannequin. She has published chapters on conservation and deterioration of archeological glass with the Materials Research Society and the York Archaeological Trust, four chapters on different mannequin construction techniques in Museum Mannequins: A Guide for Creating the Perfect Fit (2002), preservation planning, policies, forms and procedures needed for a small museum in The Minnesota Alliance of Local History Museums' Collection Initiative Manual, and is co-editor of the penultimate book on numbering museum collections (still in process) by the Gilcrease Museum in Oklahoma. Helen Alten has been a Field Education Director, Conservator, and staff trainer. She began working with people from small, rural, and tribal museums while as the state conservator for Montana and Alaska. Helen currently conducts conservation treatments and operates a conservation center in Charleston, WV and St. Paul, MN.
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