Canterbury Museum New Zealand

The challenges that followed the Canterbury earthquakes meant that valuable museum space needed to be shared while repairs were undertaken. Iron Mountain stepped in with a perfect solution.

Customer Profile

Canterbury Museum is world renowned for its natural history and human history collections. Canterbury Museum acquires and cares for world-wide collections of human and natural history, with a focus on Canterbury and the Antarctic. With significant growth over the last 15 years Canterbury Museum is world class.

The Challenge

In the wake of the Canterbury earthquakes parts of the Museum buildings were damaged and required repair so the Museum set up a temporary store room with tables for the library books from the Museum’s collections. In addition, the Museum was unable to continue to operate its Documentary Research Centre, a previously publicly accessible space containing hundreds of library books and other important reference material.

When the Christchurch Art Gallery asked if the Museum had some space they could temporarily share whilst their own repairs were being carried out, this seemed the ideal space.

It therefore had to be cleared of Museum material and made available for a different use. How to effectively move and store the library books seemed difficult and labour intensive until Iron Mountain was approached to propose a solution.

The Solution

Having been a trusted supplier to Canterbury Museum and providing temporary storage of collections that met their detailed insurance criteria, the team at Iron Mountain instantly knew the best solution in this case.

Initially the client had requested to simply move and store the books in the Iron Mountain Protect Vault however Iron Mountain proposed that the additional data from the books could be captured and catalogued making it easy to access any of the items whilst in secure storage.

In addition, upon the items returning to the Museum they could use the new database for their future reference.

The Results

An experienced team of Iron Mountain staff worked on site at Canterbury Museum entering information about the books as they were packed into the Iron Mountain cartons in preparation for transport and storage.

Book numbers and titles have been collected, and each carton has a unique RFID barcode tag which cross references the contents within each carton. Once completely recorded and safely packed a professional Iron Mountain driver transported the material to the Iron Mountain Protect Vault for secure storage.

The manner in which the work was undertaken provided minimal time investment from the Museum staff, with the project completed on schedule one week prior to the space being occupied by the Art Gallery staff.