What kind of professional tasks are required for the planned national restoration and storage centre?
MúzeumCafé 37.
According to Andrea Csapláros, director of the Town Museum in Szombathely, storage needs up-to-date conditions meeting the prescribed requirements, and can only be achieved using well planned tendering to the maximum. The new Storage Centre will provide space for objects not displayed at exhibitions. An essential aim of the centre must be to ensure the research of the stored items, and provide access to the different collections.
András Fáy, head of the restoration department at the Fine Arts Museum, believes the significance of the new institute is that it offers a national basis with storage possibilities for major collections, which previously could only function far from each other. Its other main function, with its state-of-the-art workshops, laboratories and research facilities, is to ensure the conditions for the protection, analysis and documentation of the many universal cultural treasures and their heritage.
According to art historian Árpád Mikó, head of the Hungarian National Gallery’s old Hungarian Collection, if such an ideal project could be realised, it would greatly benefit Hungary’s museology. At the same time, care should be taken not to exclude from the plans the outstanding specialists and equipment of the Restoration Department of the University of Fine Arts.
Ethnographer Lajos Kemecsi, director of the museum of ethnography, thinks direct links between the new Museum of Ethnography, other planned Museum Quarter projects and the centre providing collection storerooms and protection activity is fundamental. In order to establish a new ‘21st century’ museum it is necessary to review the entire institutional philosophy, which also serves as the basis for optimising functional relations.