Problem or opportunity? A museological review of accessible museum storage

A recent report by ICOM, Museum Storage Around the World (2024), highlighted that a vast percentage of museum collections in storage – sometimes as much as 90%. Increasingly, the discussions around how to manage these collections on a practical level are also engaging with the question of how to promote access to collections. To inform effective collections access strategies, this article takes a longer view, considering how storage has become so problematic for museums and what meaningful access looks like in the current UK museum sector. It also reflects on the current forms of museum collections storage through the lens of accessibility and suggests new categories for these spaces: Visible, Visitable, Researcher Responsive, Community Centred and Closed or Deep storage. This research draws on the findings from a UKRI-funded research project ‘Building Heritage Infrastructure’ which explored the relationship between community, locality and materiality in the museum storeroom.