Museums collections professionals rely on high-quality storage solutions to both protect and organise their valuable collections. These collections often contain a huge cross section of items that require specific storage conditions. To achieve this, each group of items also requires a particular storage system to ensure their continued preservation.
With paper and textile based artefacts, such as: blueprints, maps, or clothing, museum drawers provide a fantastic way of keep them away from moisture, pests and at the perfect temperatures for preservation.
However regular drawers can also have their issues, with size limitations and limited capacities. Plan chests, with their large, shallow drawers, offer specific advantages over regular museum drawers in museum collection storage settings, enhancing preservation and accessibility for delicate and oversized items. Here’s an overview of why plan chests are often preferred by museums for storage.
Optimal Preservation of Delicate Items
Plan chests are specially designed to store items flat, with minimal handling and minimal stress to the materials. Broad, shallow drawers allow items to be stored horizontally and undisturbed, preventing the folding, bending, or rolling that can lead to damage over time. Regular museum drawers, are often deeper and smaller, and can force items to be stacked or folded, which is detrimental to paper, textile, or fragile materials.
Space Efficiency and Organisation
Plan chests enable museums to efficiently store large, flat items without requiring excessive stacking, which can help in cataloguing and item retrieval. By providing space for full-width, single-layer storage, these chests allow for easy visual and physical access. In contrast, regular drawers may need multiple layers to store similar quantities, making organisation and quick access to items more challenging, particularly in busy collection storage areas.
Enhanced Access and Viewing
Plan chests are designed with shallow drawers, making it easy to retrieve or inspect artefacts without handling them extensively. This reduces the risk of accidental damage. Museum teams can slide open drawers and gain a full view of an item without lifting it from the storage, which is especially important for fragile items like historical documents or prints. Regular drawers typically lack this feature, requiring more movement and handling of each item to inspect or retrieve it.
Suitable for Oversized Collections
Large-format collections, such as architectural plans, posters, or maps, can be challenging to store. Plan chests are specifically built to house oversized items without requiring them to be rolled or folded, unlike regular drawers which are often too small for these formats. Proper flat storage not only preserves the items’ physical condition but also makes them easier to catalogue and identify.
Improved Collection Management and Conservation
For museum conservators, plan chests offer an ideal storage environment that supports better long-term preservation. Because items remain undisturbed in a stable position, exposure to potential contaminants or fluctuating environmental conditions is minimized. Plan chests can be equipped with archival-quality materials, offering additional protection against contaminents. With regular drawers, which may not accommodate protective materials as easily, the level of conservation can be harder to maintain.
Conclusion
For museums focused on the careful preservation and efficient management of flat, oversized, or delicate items, plan chests provide a highly suitable storage solution compared to regular drawers. By reducing handling, maximising space, and protecting the condition of precious artefacts, plan chests help museum professionals maintain collections to the highest standard while ensuring easier access and preservation for future generations.
Plan Chest Gallery
Rackline’s Plan Chests
Rackline has been producing plan chests since 1984, and can devise solutions to fit your individual requirements. Being the manufacturer, we can adjust drawer sizes (widths and depths) to suit the items you are looking to store. We can also provide inserts to keep these items secure.
Our plan chests can be fitted with locks (either individually by drawer or to secure entire units). We can also install indexing tabs for the fast identification of contents and powder coat it in any colour you require.
Our museum drawers can be found in Museums such as: Paisley Museum, The Discovery Museum and V & A.
See our dedicated page here. For more information drop us a call: 01782 770144 or get in touch via the below form and one of our team will be in touch.