AIC Quebec City Trip Travelog Part 3

On our final day we split up into two groups: one traveled to the archives of the Musse de l’Amerique Francophone part of the Musées de la Civilization and the other to the storage facilities of the same museum network. The tour of the storage facility was led by one of the museum’s curators, who wove several fascinating stories about items into our visit (including an especially intriguing and gruesome tale about the gibbet of Marie-Josephte Corriveau that recently made its way into the museum’s collection). The storage center organizes collections primarily by material and preventative conservations needs. Rooms are titled by their principal contents, such as large objects and furniture, small wooden objects, paper, metal, etc. Each room’s temperature and relative humidity vary according to the items in storage. The facility also includes large rooms for initial quarantine, cool and cold storage, a relatively small conservation lab for minor treatments, and an area for documentation. Despite the large scale of the storage spaces, barely a speck of dust could be found anywhere and it was clear that the collections are cared for very well. We only stayed for the morning, but we easily could have spent an entire day or weekend just to see the facility in its entirety.