>The Strong Museum, Rochester, NY, also has open storage.  Sporatically
>over the years, the MET's European Paintings collection has had limited
>open storage.


Lynda:
>
>This concept was central to Georges-Henri Riviere's mould-breaking Musee
>des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris nearly 30 years ago, and the
>original lower level open access storage is only now being re-thought and
>re-organised.
>
>Another example is the Metropolitan in New York which has virtually all of
>its American collections on display.  The pieces that are not in either
>the set piece historic room reconstructions or in the thematic primary
>galleries are in visible storage in an upper area - supported by a
>computer database on the whole American dept. collection wherever it is in
>the museum in the visible storage area.
>
>I do not know whether these two have been rresearched but my subjective
>experience as a many times visitor to these two is that the visible
>storage/display areas are rarely if ever empty.  On the contrary the
>growing number of collections-rich study centres in museums of many kinds
>(eg. Liverpool Museum or the York Archaeological Resource Centre in
>England, or the Native American collections in the Boston Children's
>Museum - and the great number of subsequent imitators of these - suggest
>that someone thinks putting much of the collectio out where it can be
>dipped into by visitors (literally in the case of collections in pull-out
>drawers - back to the 19th century!) is working.
>
>Patrick Boylan


------------
Bernard Barryte
Associate Director / Chief Curator
Stanford University Museum of Art
Brown Bldg./620 Campus Dr.
Stanford, CA 94305-5060

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tel:  650/ 725-0466  fax: 650/ 725-0464