 |
|
| COLLECTION CATALOGUERS:
Museum staff Melissa Kelly and Peter Campbell at work. |
|
A TWO million dollar grant and the dedication of its 11-person registration
department are paying dividends for the RAAF Museum at Point Cook.
The museum is consolidating and cataloguing its unregistered collection
under its RAAF Museum Audit Remediation Project (RMARP). According to
RMARP, it is the first comprehensive audit by any ADF history and heritage
organisation of its collection.
It began the audit early last year and is nearing the project halfway
mark. While the museum is the RAAF Museum, the name is somewhat misleading.
It is the national repository for moveable Air Force heritage, and the
RAAF Heritage Collection is massive and varied. It ranges from small items
such as Service insignia and prisoner of war relics to fully restored
and operational aircraft.
Project manager Luke Flanagan said that, excluding photographs, the collection
comprised hundreds of thousands of items. “Collection cataloguing
has been ongoing for a number of years, but this project is allowing the
museum to carry out a comprehensive audit of the collection for the first
time,” he said.
“The audit will also enable us to identify and remove from the collection
any items not deemed significant or of future use. The museum anticipates
the arrival of a number of ex-Service aircraft soon, so this new auditing
process will free up some much-needed storage space.
“It also allows the museum to catalogue and provide more appropriate
storage for the large and growing collection of service uniforms,”
he said.
“The more fragile uniforms are being transferred to acid-free archival
boxes for long-term storage.”
|
