The new Milwaukee Public Museum won't open until 2027, but the complicated packing process has already begun

The new Milwaukee Public Museum building isn't scheduled to open for another three years, but MPM staff have already started the moving process.

In February, the museum started its first round of packing the 4 million items that eventually will have to be moved to either the new building or an offsite storage facility.

According to the museum, the history department's glass and ceramic collections — 23,000 items, including things like teapots, serving platters and figurines — are being "wrapped in acid-free tissue and padded in archival foam to protect it in transport." The items will then be packed into 50 to 60 large, reusable crates.

In a recent interview with the Journal Sentinel, Sara Podejko, the museum's collections move project manager, and Jackie Schweitzer, the history collections curator, explained the work that goes into packing up a museum.

Why is packing up a museum so complicated?

Schweitzer said that packing and moving a museum is not as simple as packing and moving a house. There are several factors that complicate the packing and storage process.

First, many artifacts need to be stored in controlled environments, including organic items and old plastics that might release potentially noxious gases, or off-gas. That's not as big of a problem with the glass and ceramics collection — a key reason museum staff chose those items to test run their processes.

"We wanted items that could be stored in their crates for longer than a typical move while we work on progressing where they'll eventually be in their offsite storage facility," Podejko said. "Glass and ceramic items aren't as susceptible to pests, they're more forgiving of environmental conditions, and we don't have to worry about them off-gassing or interacting with other items in any way."

Then there's the packing process itself. Each item has to be carefully protected while in transit. Packing and moving objects isn't new to MPM curators; they periodically pack up items to loan them to other museums' exhibitions. But, as Podejko noted, that packing process usually entails constructing individualized packing and protection materials for each item.

"We can't do that as much because we have 4 million items to pack, and individualizing each item would take us 50 years," Podejko said, laughing.

That's why museum staff consulted other industry professionals who have done large-scale moving projects of their own. And they've worked together to come up with systems of packing styles and processes to make sure all the items are well-padded even if they're not perfectly individualized.

"We took some time to identify common forms that are present in glass and ceramics," Schweitzer said. "For example, there are a lot of teapots that have lids, so we came up with one packing method that we can use for all of those items, and the project assistant created packing tutorials so we can go in kind of an assembly line for each common form."

The trick now is to apply that process to the collections of items in the museum, each of which will have to be analyzed for common forms and dealt with differently.

And while packing is both labor- and thought-intensive, MPM staff also have to consider where the items will be stored when they're unpacked. For example, the glass and ceramics items won't just be left in boxes; they'll be unloaded into shelving and cabinets specially built for them.

"For glass and ceramics, we want enough room so things are not clinking into each other so you have to plan out the space and where you want to keep things," Schweitzer said. "You have to protect them from dust, protect them from light damage, there's a lot of factors to think about."

How do people even learn how to pack up and store museum artifacts?

Schweitzer and Podejko are both trained in preventive conservation, a field that works to establish and maintain processes to minimize damage and deterioration of museum collections.

"When you get a museum studies degree, you can focus on preventive conservation, or you can train to be a professional conservator," Podejko explained. "Both Jackie and I went the museum studies degree route. I oversee that conservation here at the museum now and Jackie is my go-to person to help me out."

Although Podejko described the preventive conservation learning curve as pretty steep, there are online resources from museum organizations that help staff make conservation decisions, especially as they pack, move and store their collections.

"Beyond the collections staff that we have here, who are working on this project along with their day-to-day museum work, we also have a project assistant for whom this is their full-time job," Podejko said. "We have two full-time packers, and we're hiring another person in the zoology department who will be starting inventory on the collections there to prepare for their move."

How does the museum keep track of the items?

Being able to track the items that are packed, moved and stored starts with having a good collections inventory. That's something Schweitzer made a project out of starting in 2019. The pandemic actually helped facilitate the process.

Schweitzer said some of the museum's history collection items had digital records, but tens of thousands of items were kept track of in huge leather ledgers. She figured out how to standardize a digital inventory system, then brought on some volunteers to "sit with the leather volumes, go line by line and fill in whatever wasn't yet in the digital inventory."

"It actually worked out during COVID because it was something that people could do at home," Schweitzer said. "I had one volunteer who really enjoyed that he could socialize with us virtually and keep busy while he filled in the gaps."

While the volunteers made good progress, Schweitzer said she had to bring in five staff members to help her complete the inventory. For a while, they worked three days a week on just inventorying, and ended up with 144,000 digitized records.

Once they had a digital inventory, it was time to start the bar-coding process.

"We need to bar-code every object so we can know where everything is once it's moved," Schweitzer said. "Then we'll use those bar codes in perpetuity to help us manage our collections."

So far, museum staff have bar-coded about 23,000 objects.

"As a collections manager, it's been an amazing opportunity to have this move coming up because it's allowed us to get this process done faster," Schweitzer said. "I've actually dreamed about bar coding for years now."

Where is everything getting stored until the new museum opens?

The museum is in the process of securing and preparing offsite storage for the collections items until the new museum is finished — or for good, depending on the item.

In the meantime, as the crates are filled, Podejko said staff are "finding little nooks and crannies within the current building that meet our standards and requirements." The crates will stay in those nooks and crannies until the storage areas are ready in the offsite facility; then the items will be unpacked and stored, while the crates are brought back to the museum to be reused for more packing.

What items will be the most difficult to move?

Schweitzer and Podejko both said thoughts of the move have kept them up at night as they've pondered packing and storage logistics. That's especially true of some of the more "difficult" objects.

Podejko said that, while some items aren't intuitively difficult to move, there are specific issues that complicate matters. For example, the museum has ethanol collections in jars that are subject to legal restrictions when they're moved.

"I think about how we're going to move large-scale objects that will require specialized moving, like the Schlemmer automobile," Schweitzer said.

"That's true," Podejko said. "We also have to figure out how to move the Hebior Mammoth and our whale. And our torosaur."

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee Public Museum starts process of packing for its new home