ManitobaMuseum

Carolyn: Oh, that's a big question. To sum up, all of our collections are kept in storage vaults, some of them are humidity/temperature controlled and we monitor them. There are no lights on unless we're in the room so nohting gets light damage, and we try to keep dust and pollutants off of them. Bugs are a big thing! Everything gets frozen when it comes in the building to kill anything off, or we have a carbon dioxide chamber, kind of a bubbly tent that kills everything. Bugs are probably the biggest problem, especially for anything organic.

Diana: For bones, we have a dermestid drawer to deflesh bones, if it's a skeleton going into the collection or something like that.

Amelia: Carolyn's a cold-blooded killer.

Diana: Oh! Somebody put their kid in the wolf diorama and it was crawling around crushing the lichen and was touching the wolf.

Carolyn: Somebody jumped into the wolf diorama last year and took a selfie! People have picked up mushrooms out of baskets and thrown them around, somebody picked up the entire woman from the Trappers diorama and broke her pinky.

Diana: Part of the reason we had to wall off the area in the Urban Gallery is people were stealing things.

Amelia: Even rocks! We've had to bring in extra rocks to fill things in.

Carolyn: The BEST thing I ever found on the Nonsuch, I still laugh about it, some kid left a note that said something like "Dear People of the Future, this maiden ship" ... something... and I don't remember exactly but it was signed "Person of the Past." I still have it.

Amelia: Nope. It's already such a nightmare, never mind people walking around all through there.

Diana: I like the idea of an overpass. You know what I would like to see there? Old-timey photographs of what things used to look there. All four corners should have a photo of the 1920 or something, and generally most people no idea what that site looked like, historically. Also, the signage is so bad down there.

Carolyn: No. Leave it how it is. It's fine.

Kevin: Currently it's not--it's not an area that really draws you, so maybe opening it up would create more of that for people. I don't know.

Favourite areas:

Amelia: I love the dioramas, because it makes you feel like you're in a particular place at a particular time.

Kevin: I love the mini-dioramas, because it humanizes the archeological past.

Diana: I like the Nonsuch. I like the way it smells.

As for things we'd like to replace, we're in the middle of our Capital Campaign called "Bringing Our Stories Forward," with the goal of refreshing 42% of the museum galleries. It's a $19 million museum gallery renewal project! Honestly, we'd like to give a facelift to a lot of stuff that's been here for a while, and we're really excited to get started on it.

As for the controversy, you may be confusing us with the Canadian Museum of Human Rights ;)

We do not. If anything the HBC archives might have something, but... if anyone has anything like that, we will happily take that off your hands! ^{for science..}