Peabody Museum

The yale peabody museum consolidates collections and improves storage environments with spacesaver systems

situation:

The Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, a premier institution in the areas of anthropology, paleontology and zoology,recently opened the Class of 1954 Environmental Sciences Center and utilized Spacesaver storage systems for most of its collections.

“Anytime you build a new university facility, campus space is an issue,” said Tim White, assistant director for collections and operations. “By utilizing Spacesaver compact storage systems instead of conventional storage methods, the Peabody was able to cut storage space requirements in half by shrinking 40,000 square feet of storage into 17,000 square feet.” By reducing cubic space, the museum also saved ongoing utility costs associated with the environmentally controlled storage areas.

solution:

The new 100,000 square foot facility — which houses 60 percent of the Peabody collection as well as offices and labs for faculty from the departments of Anthropology, Geology and Geophysics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and the School of Forestry — includes more than 250 high-density carriages, 40,000 drawers, 2,000 museum cabinets and 16,000 linear feet of shelving. The storage solutions helped the museum achieve one of the primary facility design goals to separate collection space from people space so that specimen storage could be better controlled.

Three floors of collection storage house more than 7.5 million specimens including Botany, Entomology, Herpetology, Ichthyology, Invertebrate Paleontology, Invertebrate Zoology, Mammalogy, Ornithology and Paleobotany — including some specimens that date back two billion years.

A wide array of storage methods are utilized to safely house specimens:

• Delta Designs’ cases with drawers and trays for small specimens including bird and mammal skins, and fossil shells
• Wide-span shelving for large taxidermy mounts and fossil tree stumps
• Heavy-duty, four-post shelving with reinforced supports for bulky, oversized fossil storage
• Specialty shelving bins for fluid-preserved collections
• Cantilever shelving with glass doors for rare books and manuscripts
• Cornel drawer tray system

Spacesaver and Delta Designs, Ltd. worked with the university to custom design special features that enhanced the collections’ safety. Uniquely formulated powder coat paint was used on drawer glides to minimize particulate sloughing and vibration of stored items. Also, for open-shelf applications, special gasketing was added to the entire parameter of each shelf aisle to ensure a constant seal when carriages are closed, thus protecting against damaging elements.

White explained that the museum has received numerous accolades for its innovative storage and facility design. “We recommend Spacesaver other people,” concluded White. “Not only have we improved the safety and efficiency of collection storage, we have brought our collections together in one building so that researchers can conveniently study a cross-section of specimens representing the entire history of life.”