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Costume & Textile Study Department
Norwich Castle Study Centre
Market Avenue
Norwich
Norfolk NR1 3JQ
C&TA will continue to meet regularly with Museum staff to hear about progress and will keep members informed.
Updated information on the Museum's Service website.
www.museums..norfolk.gov.uk What's On
See opposite for an extract from our recent newsletter, written by Ruth Battersby Tooke, Curator of the Costume & Textile Collection at the Study Centre;
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The big move
We are all very excited that this spring sees the culmination of the project to move the collections and workspaces from Carrow House to the Norwich Castle Study Centre.
Staff and volunteers have been working for the past year on improving the storage and documentation of the collections in readiness for this reorganisation of the storage facilities of these wonderful collections. The mobile storage funded by the C&TA is enabling us to be able to fit neatly into our new home.
Thanks to the tireless effort of several C&TA members, ably co-ordinated by Lisa Little, Curatorial Assistant, we have dress bags and padded, covered hangers for every item of hanging costume. The generous commitment of time has enabled us to save over £5,000 on the cost of ready-made costume bags.
Huge improvements have been made to the storage of accessories and craft and needlework tools by creating trays with recesses cut for individual objects making the objects safer for transportation, easier to access for visitors and attractive for groups to view.
Our final challenge is to re-roll the bedcovers collection onto hollow tubes which will increase the diameter of the roll thereby reducing any wrinkling.
As these improvements are being made the catalogue is steadily being added to with accurate box or bag locations to enable us to easily find individual items when they are requested.
We are, as always, hugely grateful to our wonderful volunteers without whom we would have found these tasks impossible!
Another exciting strand of work is the writing of the Collection Level Descriptions, a project funded by the C&TA. We have been able to recruit a Documentation Assistant to write descriptions of groups of collections such as the Occupational and Religious Dress and Textiles so that it will be possible to get a good idea of what we have. These will be used to enable more people to see more of the collections by raising awareness. I am looking forward to presenting the results of this work to the C&TA AGM in May.
The Costume and Textile Library, Resources and Handling Collections are available to use now, telephone 01603 493625 to make an appointment and we are aiming to make the main collections available shortly after our move, please telephone on the number above after April.
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