How Museums Curate, Preserve and Display Artifacts: A Behind-the-Scenes Guide

Only a small fraction of what a museum owns is ever on view. The Smithsonian Institution, for example, keeps more than 54 million items in its Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland, a complex of five storage buildings nicknamed "pods," each roughly the size of a three-storey football field, according to Wikipedia's entry on the facility. The rest of the process — deciding what enters a collection, how it is recorded, where it is kept, and under what light it can safely be shown — follows a sequence that is largely the same across institutions worldwide.

Step 1: Deciding what to acquire

Before anything enters a museum's permanent collection, staff ask whether the object fits the institution's stated mission, whether its ownership history (provenance) is documented and legal, and whether the museum can actually care for it long-term, according to collections-management guidance published by CatalogIt. Most objects arrive as gifts, purchases, bequests, field-collected material, or transfers from another institution, and each route requires different paperwork — gift agreements, purchase receipts, wills, or collecting permits.

Step 2: Accessioning — making it legally part of the collection

Accessioning is the formal, legal act of adding an object to a museum's permanent collection, as distinct from simply having it in a building. Each accepted object receives a unique accession number, typically built from the year and a sequential number — for example 2021.3 — with individual pieces inside a single acquisition (such as a two-piece outfit) given sub-numbers like 2021.3.1 and 2021.3.2, CatalogIt explains.

Step 3: Cataloguing and documentation

Cataloguing is a separate, descriptive step that follows accessioning. Staff record the object's maker, date, materials, dimensions, condition, provenance and any existing conservation reports into a collection database, creating the detailed record researchers and future staff will rely on, per the same CatalogIt guidance.

Step 4: Storage under controlled conditions

Once catalogued, most objects go into storage rather than a gallery. At the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center, temperature is generally held at 70°F (plus or minus 4 degrees) and relative humidity at 45% (plus or minus 8%), per Wikipedia, with the facility also housing greenhouses for botanical specimens and tanks for 25 million biological specimens preserved in fluid. ICOM's own guidance for conservation of collections stresses regular air circulation and clean HVAC filters in storage areas, and recommends a quarantine area with clearly marked shelving for incoming or at-risk objects before they join the general collection.

Step 5: Conservation — stabilizing, not necessarily restoring

Conservators are specialists, usually holding an advanced degree or years of apprenticeship, whose job is examination, documentation, treatment and preventive care of objects, according to conserv.io's overview of the profession. Conservation splits into two related but distinct activities: preventive conservation, which manages the environment around objects — enclosures, pollution, humidity, light — to slow deterioration before it starts; and restoration, which is treatment aimed at returning an object to an earlier appearance and may add non-original material. Stabilizing the object, while preserving as much original material as possible, takes priority over restoring its appearance, per the same source.

Curators and conservators have different, complementary jobs. A conservator's question is "how do we care for this object," while a curator's question is "what does this object mean" — curators bring subject expertise (art history, anthropology, archaeology), handle acquisitions and research, and shape exhibitions, conserv.io notes.

Step 6: Display — light is the main enemy

When an object finally goes on view, light exposure is tightly limited and measured in lux, with cumulative damage tracked in "lux hours" (illumination level in lux multiplied by hours of exposure), according to a technical bulletin from the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (CCAHA). Recommended maximum light levels vary by material sensitivity.

Ultraviolet light is treated separately because it carries more energy than visible light and causes disproportionate damage. CCAHA cites a maximum allowable UV level of 75 microwatts per lumen across all categories, with 0–10 microwatts per lumen as an achievable target using modern filtering and LED fixtures.

ICOM's conservation guidance adds practical display rules: display cases should be thoroughly cleaned before reopening to the public, cleaning solutions must never contact the artifacts themselves, and only trained conservators should handle objects once they are on exhibit — alcohol-based disinfectants, for instance, can damage materials such as Plexiglas or shellac varnish.

Why the sequence matters

ICOM's recommendations for the conservation of museum collections treat documentation, controlled storage, careful handling and limited display not as separate concerns but as parts of one long-term responsibility: keeping objects usable for research and exhibition while minimising the damage each stage could cause. Every step described above — legal accessioning, detailed cataloguing, climate-controlled storage, minimal-intervention conservation, and light-limited display — exists to make that continued use possible.