The Milwaukee Public Museum has now packed 600,000 items from its collection of 4 million as the staff prepares to move them into their new home: The Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin at 1310 N. 6th St.
The staff could still be working through 2027 to move the remaining items, said Collections Move Project Manager Sara Podejko on June 24.
“We will continue packing here even after the future museum opens,” Podejko said.
According to the museum’s June report to the County Board’s committee on parks and culture, construction continues to move along on track, and the new site is expected to open mid-way through 2027.
About half of the total collection has already been inventoried, a painstaking process that has given the museum the opportunity to streamline its electronic storage system.
“There’s been a lot of work ongoing in the collections departments prior to digitize their material, but not everything was. And so, a real upside to this move is that we are able to not only inventory, but barcode all of our specimens,” Podejko said.
That barcode allows collection move technicians to easily input items into an inventory spreadsheet and immediately relocate them.
“It kind of eliminates some human error, which is really important when you’re dealing with four million things,” Podejko said.
Twenty-nine staff members are facilitating the move, including the technicians who were hired and trained specifically to move the artifacts.
“Every time they pack an object, they first assess it for its condition, weaknesses, areas of stability, and then they adapt the pack to that object itself,” Podejko said.
Many of the technicians are also recent graduates and early professionals looking to break into the museum collections scene.
“Collections can be difficult to get into and a job like this kind of gives them (a) foot in the door,” Podejko said.
The public museum’s current facility has continued to face structural challenges amid the move. In January, a passenger elevator failed and was out of service for two months. The only elevator was a small one for wheelchairs, which led to wait times as long as 30 minutes. During that time, an escalator was also taken out of service for repairs.
The museum’s 350-ton water-cooled chiller is also close to failure and needs bearing replacement to keep it functioning throughout the summer.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Preparing for move, museum has already packed more than 600,000 items
Reporting by Joey Schamber, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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By Joey Schamber, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | USA TODAY Network
