Aberdeen makes offer on downtown musuem location

Moving collection to new location would faciliate re-documentation

By Dan Hammock • October 23, 2021 1:30 am
The orange lines on the back wall of the warehouse storing the Aberdeen Museum’s artifacts are part of an elaborate fire detection system that can be moved from the warehouse to another location when one is secured. (Courtesy Aberdeen museum board)
The orange lines on the back wall of the warehouse storing the Aberdeen Museum’s artifacts are part of an elaborate fire detection system that can be moved from the warehouse to another location when one is secured. (Courtesy Aberdeen museum board)

A workshop on Wednesday, Oct. 20, between the Aberdeen museum board and City Council ended with Mayor Pete Schave saying the city has made an offer on the yet-undisclosed downtown museum location being considered by the city.

“The city of Aberdeen has done everything required of us to produce an offer to the owners of the building,” he said. “We’re waiting to hear back, we haven’t heard any response to this point.”

Earlier in the meeting, the board told the City Council that a move to a new location would have multiple benefits long before any such location could be open to the public.

“One of the things we’ve been talking about recently is we have great hopes in the likelihood we will be moving the collection, so how do we move the collection in conjunction with re-documenting” the museum’s artifacts, said museum board president John Shaw.

Re-documenting the collection has been difficult from the start. There was no external backup for the documentation and the museum’s computers were damaged in the fire. Shaw and fellow board member George Donovan met with an IT professional experienced in artifact recovery to discuss what was needed. Then COVID-19 hit.

“We were pretty hamstrung on being able to even visit the warehouse, a city facility,” said Donovan. Now, he said, another meeting with that IT person is needed, that person’s recommendations will be added to the board’s overall plan “to detail the steps to be taken for each artifact to be verified as still existing in the collection, or to be added to the collection,” or removed from it.

For now, the collection is in a good place, protected by a high-tech fire detection system, in a warehouse in the Port Industrial area. Problem is, it’s costing the city about $5,000 a month to rent while the board has been giving potential locations to the city to explore that for one reason or another have not worked out.

Moving into the new building would help facilitate the collection cataloguing process and, eventually, serve as a point of community engagement with the collection.

“We are interested in planning to use the move and the handling as a point of a focus point to organize and re-document the remaining collection,” said Shaw. “We want to utilize the new location to begin the process of community engagement. Initially, we believe this new location will purely be a storage and assessment area, but we are hopeful it will become a place where we can engage the public.”

Shaw said the board plans to use volunteers, including the Friends of the Aberdeen Museum and city-approved volunteers, to manage the collection.

“The museum board has been a proponent of utilizing volunteers, and expressly the Friends, and engaging and doing the work of getting back into the museum in handling the collection,” he said. “If we can work that out with the city, and just how we will do that, we see a number of ways that is possible.”

Shaw said the museum should be thought of as more than a place that stores the history of the region.

“We need to think of this museum beyond just being an expense when I’m talking to the City Council,” he said. “This is a community asset. Museums really become key and important to redeveloping an area, and we need to take this museum and, in addition to doing good museum work, we need to have it be that anchor for downtown to help with all the other things we’re trying to bring together. And you have a board here who really believes that we can do that.”

Expense of operations has been a bit of a sticking point, with the City Council approving the hiring of a city employee to act as a registrar of sorts for the collection, but Schave unwilling to fill it. Shaw, who also manages three museums on the South Beach, believes that job can be done by volunteers, and said part of operations can be covered by admission fees.

“We do 16-18,000 paid admissions a year in a town of 1,900, so we get 40% of our operating revenue from ticket sales,” he said. “And the Aberdeen museum and Aberdeen core should be able to add an admissions-based component to its operating model.”

The board has wanted to work toward accreditation, something Shaw said is often unattainable for many museums, but includes a process of best practices for the collection and can lead to financial and other benefits for the museum.

“It’s imperative that we follow what they call the continuum of excellence, which we’ve already started on,” said Shaw. “Really what it’s about is raising the bar and doing the things we need to do to Aberdeen’s museum as we rebuild it. I’d hate to think that we’re going to lower the bar when we have a chance to reset it.”

That process includes something called the museum assessment plan, or MAP, a list of guidelines for small- and medium-sized museums established by the American Alliance of Museums to strengthen operations and plan for the future. Shaw said going through the accreditation process, especially the MAP process, also opens the museum up to more grant opportunities.

Most of the collection, stored in various locations after the fire, is now in the warehouse, minus the thousands of recovered pictures still at the Washington State Archives.

“The Washington State Archives jumped in right after the fire with our pictures,” said Donovan. “They got in and they cleaned and dried all the pictures that they salvaged from the basement.” They were not damaged by fire, but by the gallons of water used to douse the fire above them.

How many pictures? Donovan said there were 188 boxes at the archives.

“I was told there’s about 5,000 pictures,” but with negatives, glass plate negatives, etc., “there could be a lot more than 5,000, it could be as high as 10-15,000 pictures, and they couldn’t be in a safer place.” The last step for the photos will be re-wetting and drying them, then flattening them, “and then they can come back to Aberdeen.”

Courtesy of Aberdeen museum board Aberdeen museum board member George Donovan and two people from the Washington State Historical Society tour the collection in its current location, a warehouse in the Port district. At the left is the last neon sign that hung outside the Spar Cafe, discovered in the armory building annex after the armory fire.

Courtesy of Aberdeen museum board Aberdeen museum board member George Donovan and two people from the Washington State Historical Society tour the collection in its current location, a warehouse in the Port district. At the left is the last neon sign that hung outside the Spar Cafe, discovered in the armory building annex after the armory fire.

The orange lines on the back wall of the warehouse storing the Aberdeen Museum’s artifacts are part of an elaborate fire detection system that can be moved from the warehouse to another location when one is secured. (Courtesy Aberdeen museum board)

The orange lines on the back wall of the warehouse storing the Aberdeen Museum’s artifacts are part of an elaborate fire detection system that can be moved from the warehouse to another location when one is secured. (Courtesy Aberdeen museum board)