New mobile racking system goes into operation

On Friday, 12 January at 3.30 pm, the new mobile shelving system for the city's natural science collections will be put into operation in the basement storeroom of the Museum für Naturkunde Chemnitz in the TIETZ.

Representatives of the media are invited to attend.

The construction consists of nine metal shelves that move back and forth by hand crank on three rails embedded in the floor, plus upright shelves at both ends of the rails and on a side wall. Where there used to be immovable cabinets, almost 670 linear metres of shelving space have now been created for the geosciences collection in a space-saving manner. With around 50,000 inventory items ranging from the finest grain of ash from Mount Vesuvius to fossilised tree trunks weighing several tonnes, this has been the focus of the museum's research and collection activities for more than a century and a half.

The size and nature of the collection necessitated some remodelling work in the basement of the listed building. The demolition of two partition walls turned three small storage rooms into one larger one, and the rails also had to be firmly anchored to the floor. The total cost of the project with the Zambelli construction amounts to more than 80,000 euros, the investment funds were provided by the City of Chemnitz and the Free State of Saxony.

Background:

"Researching, collecting, preserving, communicating and exhibiting" are the tasks of a museum according to the International Council of Museums (ICOM). Collections need a system - and above all space - to ensure that they are permanently protected and can be found at any time for research and education.

In 1861, the Natural Science Society of Chemnitz, which had been founded two years earlier, began to set up natural science collections. Initially stored in the homes of the three honorary curators for zoology, botany and geology/mineralogy, the collections grew rapidly. In 1864, the society offered its collections as a donation to the city of Chemnitz, which in return undertook to provide suitable rooms for the storage and exhibition of the artefacts. These were found in 1868 and the city accepted the donation. This is how the first municipal museum in Chemnitz came into being, which opened its doors to visitors in the Lechla Villa on 7 May 1876.

Three conditions are documented at this first location: initially one exhibition room, later two and finally four exhibition rooms and even a study, which housed the natural science library. The objects were housed in wooden collection cabinets, some of which were glazed. Time and again, the reports tell of a great lack of space, which meant that the items had to be crammed together and sometimes packed in boxes, and visitors could hardly move around in the cramped rooms. A magazine was out of the question.

With the move to the newly built König-Albert-Museum in 1909, modern metal and glass display cases from the Dresden company Kühnscherf were purchased for the exhibition. Some of these were equipped with drawers. The old exhibition furniture was banished to the workrooms "for the storage of duplicates". The city's natural history collection spent the following century alongside the art collections in the König-Albert-Museum, until this too was bursting at the seams.

In 2004, the Museum of Natural History moved to the new TIETZ cultural and educational centre in the heart of the city. At that time, the basement storerooms could be equipped with existing and a few new cabinets, which were just sufficient for the collections taken over from the König-Albert-Museum. However, the planned and targeted expansion of the collections through purchases, donations, bequests and the museum's own collecting activities, in particular through the scientific excavations in Chemnitz-Hilbersdorf and on the Sonnenberg, quickly showed that a contemporary storage system was needed to keep the city's collections and cultural assets safe and secure in the 21st century for research and exhibition purposes. century and accessible for research and exhibition purposes.