The photo speaks volumes.
A snapshot of a collection storage room at the Museum and Archives of Vernon shows a space with water pipes running precariously along the ceiling above museum items, risking damage if a pipe were to burst.
It is evident from the photo that the museum's current building was not originally designed to contain and preserve all of its historical records, materials and artifacts.
It's a massive collection: the archives contain 107 linear metres of textual records, including 300 fonds (archival collections), 33,000 photographs, 1,600 cartographic and architectural items such as maps and blueprints, 600 sound and moving holdings and 4,600 library items.
Items as old as 1860 are contained in the walls of the civic complex on 32nd Avenue, which has been home to the Vernon museum for nearly 60 years.
The building has served the museum well for the most part, but museum leadership is eagerly awaiting its new home.
Construction is expected to get underway later this year on the Greater Vernon Cultural Centre, and once complete, the $46 million cultural hub will house the Museum and Archives of Vernon and the Vernon Public Art Gallery.
The blueprint of the Cultural Centre has been reduced as a cost-saving measure over the years. According to Lisa Ramsey, the museum's manager and interim executive director, that means the collections and exhibit spaces will need to be reduced by 30 per cent compared to the old building. On the other hand, the Cultural Centre will have room for more people to attend events.
In February, The Morning Star to discuss the Cultural Centre's future impact on young people in the area.
Now, we're turning attention to the museum to discuss the shortcomings of its current building and the benefits of moving into the Cultural Centre.
Adrianna Strange has been the museum's board president since June 2024. Here is her conversation with The Morning Star about the future of the museum and what the Cultural Centre will one day provide.
Q. What are the benefits of museums? How important is it to document and preserve local history? If the Vernon museum disappeared overnight, what would the community be missing out on?
A. Speaking about our museum specifically, we have six core values that guide what we do: our aim is to be inclusive, courageous, good stewards of the collection, ethical, innovative and transparent. In the broader scheme of what museums are intended to be, there's a few different viewpoints on that.
A term that we like to use is we invite people to wander and to wonder. We want to be able to spark conversations. We want to be a welcoming place that represents the community, that's a safe place to sometimes have uncomfortable conversations, a place to come and question, a place to learn, a place to engage with other stakeholders or the broader community in general.
We want our collection to be relevant to Vernon, and we've got pretty detailed criteria from our collections team on what makes an item relevant for Vernon, what makes it appropriate to have on display. Building a sense of community is really important, so we love the fact there's going to be some community space within the Cultural Centre that can be rented out by different groups.
Last year alone, we had more than 3,000 visitors come through our doors, and we had more than 1,200 people attend our events. In relation to the size of Vernon, that's quite a draw. In terms of what people would be missing, we have a lot of groups come through who are (otherwise) in isolation. It's a place that people can come without judgment. It can be a really quiet space for them to come and grab a cup of coffee and look at an exhibit in terms that are safe for them, or it can be a place to come and engage in a broader community and be able to learn on a new topic or a topic they're already interested in.
We've got fantastic stories coming out of people who have come into Vernon, and we've got videotapes of their grandfathers speaking, and they've never heard their grandfather's voice before. Because we've got that audio, they're able to hear what life was like in Vernon, what was important to that generation.
Q. The Museum and Archives of Vernon is set to move into the Cultural Centre, and we know its current building isn't getting any younger. What is the situation with the current building and how urgent is it to get into a newer space?
A. This is our 75th anniversary and during those years we've moved locations twice. We started as a taxidermy collection at the back of a local high school in 1950. We moved into the former police station in 1956, and then we've been in a civic complex building for the last 59 years, since 1966.
What's exciting about the Cultural Centre is it will be a purpose-built building with the intention of housing a museum inside of it. We are limited currently as to what exhibits we can have in-house, especially travelling exhibits, because we're restricted due to physical space requirements like low ceilings, needing a certain technology that we don't have the requirements for, or even just things like a maximum capacity for people. Right now we're limited to having 60 guests in the museum at one time.
A bigger space would allow us to house different exhibits. And right now we're missing out on exhibits that go through Calgary to Vancouver. They can't stop here because we don't have the requirements that they need in order to feel comfortable leaving their exhibits within our space.
Our role when someone donates something is that we have to keep it in that way for as long as possible in the same state that it arrived in, which means we need certain requirements when it comes to humidity, temperature, storage, lighting. And we have modified our current space, but we're, again, limited in what we can do, and having a purpose-built space would allow us to do so much more.
Q. What will the Cultural Centre provide in terms of improvements to the experience of people visiting the museum?
A. Right now, we're proud to say that many of our events are sold out, and that's partially due to being limited with the number of people that we can have in the building. So, we'll have access to a larger space, larger communal areas that we can use as overflow to be able to host events.
What a lot of people don't know is we're also a very popular venue rental for other non-profits and associations who don't have their own physical space, but on occasion need a place to host, facilitate, or conduct business. So, a number of other non-profits rely on us and our rental space, which we have at a really affordable price. The Cultural Centre will allow us to do a lot more of that and be able to give back to other non-profits who want to utilize those spaces. We'll have better accessibility, we'll have increased opening hours, and we want to increase participation from our underserved audiences and make sure that the collections are accessible.
Even simple things like where outlets are on the floors or the walls will help us be able to plan out new exhibits or travelling exhibits that can come in, or small performances or presentations. We'll be able to do a better job of rotating exhibits and bringing more items out of our collection for public display ... so people can keep coming back every few months and see something new.
Q. The museum has a say in how its new home will be designed. What stage of the plans has been reached for this purpose-built space, and what kinds of features do you imagine this new space will have?
A. We are in conversations with a very talented consulting group which specializes and does a lot of focused work for museums, for arts and history groups like ours. They can come in with their ideas and be able to help us plan out if we want to change an exhibit, what outlets need to be where in the floor, what doors need to be able to open and close, what are the requirements for structural beams and can we hang something from the ceiling. We're in those conversations right now to be able to customize the space that we would be moving into within the Cultural Centre.
We're also in conversations on a broader scale of what does our strategic plan need to look like to support staffing levels, training, looking at our current collection, looking at our storage needs and within our archives as well to be able to support the move in a more holistic sense.
Q. The plan is to keep the archives at its current location and move the rest of the museum into the Cultural Centre. As some Vernonites have questioned this, tell us what went into that decision.
A. As the project has progressed over many years, the footprint of the building was changed. When plans were made to decrease the square footage of the indoor space of the building, we had to make concessions and compromise, and it was decided to keep the archives in their current location and move only the museum into the Cultural Centre.
We have made significant modifications into that (current archive) space to make sure that it's a room that has humidity control, temperature control, it has waterproofing, it has fireproofing. So we are going to be dividing our team in between two buildings in order to make it work within the footprint of the Cultural Centre.
Q. What most excites you about the Cultural Centre and the prospect of moving into it in the relatively near future?
A. I would say the thing I'm most excited about as a result of the move is going to be the conversations that will be taking place as a direct result. We'll be able to modify exhibits, we'll be able to bring more people through, we'll be able to bring in better educational tools for schools and be able to continue renting out our spaces to different groups. And so it's seeing how the community will be able to interact with the 25,000-plus items that we have and the conversations that will be sparked from that.
We talked a little bit about individuals who are reconnecting with family members because of their visit to the Museum and Archives. Just being able to build on that and see how the community will react, what the feedback is going to be, and how we can better serve both short and long-term to make sure that we are a place that reflects the greater Vernon area and how it's grown over so, so many years.
