How Our Volunteers Helped Move a Museum
Volunteers play a huge part in the collections care at the Museum of Gloucester, and we have managed to achieve an incredible amount with their help. We have a rather large 750,000 collection and as you can imagine, this takes up a lot of our time and resources. It is so wonderful that we have passionate, friendly and brilliant volunteers who help us care for our mammoth amount of collections.
Over the last year we have tackled big projects such as the social history decant from storage areas at the Folk of Gloucester on Westgate Street and the Discovery Centre, Store to Store project. These large projects were to enable us to better care for the collection and to ensure that they are stored properly.
The large collection decant of our social history collection from storerooms at the former Folk Museum on Westgate Street meant the move of a grand total of c.25,000 items, which we have also been processing by photographing, measuring and recording condition, and any additional details before packing ready for the move. We have an incredible team of volunteers who have made the move of these objects possible!
Our volunteers for the decant project have enabled us to:
Process over 4,000 objects
Move 10,000 objects within 5 weeks!
Move 25,000 objects in total
Remove and rebuild 10-15 sets of racking
As the decant project comes to a close at the end of June 2026, we reflect on the amazing objects, if somewhat bizarre, over the last few years. All our volunteers have brought fun, sparkle and a sense of humour to all the work that we do. Without them this move would not have managed to be completed at this time or with quite so much hilarity and composure!
We have had 93 volunteers with us for our Discovery Centre project where we sorted through over 2,500 boxes of archaeology boxes in the collection, giving a mammoth total of 4,500 hours. Sorting over 2.5 tonnes of archaeology – that is a lot by any standards! This project has been so successful that we have moved the Discovery Centre upstairs on the first floor at the Museum of Gloucester on Brunswick Road, this success is in great part due to the fantastic help and attitude of the volunteers who gave so much of their time to the project. Thank you for all your hard work and your enthusiasm.
A huge thank you to all the wonderful volunteers we work with and for the time that they give to helping us look after our 750,000 strong collection.