How long does cataloguing take?
Cataloguing is a very time consuming process. It is necessary to enable visitors to be able to choose which items from the collection they want to see and to place them together with other relevant matter. Items also need to be preserved so they cannot be damaged by handling. Therefore each of the thousands of individual pieces in the collection needs to be sorted, arranged, preserved, entered on a computer database, numbered and stored safely. This process takes approximately 10 hours per box and as there are 950 boxes the whole collection so it would take one person working full time 5 years to complete the whole process!
