Captivating behind-the-scenes footage shows huge collection of 1.4 million museum artefacts
  • last year
These captivating behind-the-scenes pictures show a huge collection of 1.4 million artefacts which are stored at a museum resource centre. The collection of fine art, fossils, animals and armour are housed in 17 purpose-built and environmentally controlled pods at Glasgow Museums Resource Centre. A staggering 400,000 species are kept in the natural history collection including a walruses, deer and thousands of birds, such as owls, eagles and albatross. Sam, a well-known tiger at Calderpark Zoo in Glasgow in the 1950s, sits on one of the shelves, and a huge bison head is part of the mounted species collection. A Chhau mask of the goddess Durga from Purulia, West Bengal, also features in the collection. It was made by Nepal Chandra Sutradhar, a tribal Chhau dancer and mask maker, in 2001. The fine arts pod is home to 4,000 paintings including one by Sandro Botticelli called The Annunciation. Each pod has its own climate control with ideal conditions around 50 per cent relative humidity and temperatures of 18°C. Just two per cent of Glasgow’s museum’s collections are on display at any one time with most of the remaining objects stored at the resource centre. Visitors can take behind-the-scenes tours around the centre to get a glimpse into the vast collection.
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