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>> In my opinion this is quite an unusual move procedure
for a museum.
We were very short of time when we were told that we'd need to be
out of the old space and pack it.
There's about 68,000 specimens in the collection.
It took about three months to pack up the museum
in the Darwin building and we had specialist museum packers
to work with us so it's not just a case
of getting a man in a van and sticking it in.
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The space we've got now is much bigger.
It's also got a big central space which we can use
for teaching, public events and meetings, really anything
which we didn't have in the old spaces.
Also significantly larger in terms of display cases.
Being a former library the whole room's lined with bookcases.
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Because we've got so much more space it really, actually was a
fairly unplanned process in that we'd unpack a box and decide
where it goes and every case on the wall is a different size
and height and width so it'd be really hard
to plan anyway cause you'd have to measure the footprint
of every specimen before you planned it
so it was almost entirely unplanned.
We've always had on display a tray
of dodo bones; it's a fairly large collection so it's a tray
of bones but it's actually significant.
Some things that we were really worried
about we looked after.
That's actually known as Elky: it's a giant deer
skull and antlers, nearly three metres across.
He's very difficult to pack and we didn't know quite
where he was going in the new museum
so he's caused some problems but he was the last thing
to come in but he's fine now.
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The museum is mostly arranged taxonomically,
so every animal is displayed with its relatives but with some
of the new cases, the book cases, we've done some other
things, so we've got 10 of the cases that we're calling question cases
and each of these cases has an iPad attached to them
and museums haven't used iPads in this way before
so it's kind of testing technology.
The museum has been taking shape slowly and slowly and slowly
since we took over the space in November
so it's only taken five months to bring everything in.
We were mostly unpacked by the end of January;
it's very exciting to see it.
It's an old Victorian collection
with nice cutting edge technology doing new things.
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