Providing Access

The Pitt Rivers Museum is committed to making all its collections accessible, and to this end supports more than 300 research visits every year to examine material in the collections. We regularly provide researchers with access to museum objects in our reserve collection. In preparation for a research visit I need to retrieve the requested objects.

Cataloguing North American stone arrow heads © Pitt Rivers Museum

I catalogue the objects, ensuring the database record is up to date. I physically assign the accession number (unique museum identification number), write a description, transcribe labels, measure, photograph and check the condition of the objects. I then store the artefacts in a temporary holding room before the visit.

Inside the temporary object holding room © Pitt Rivers Museum

All enquiries concerning the Object Collections should be addressed to Julia Nicholson and Jeremy Coote (Joint Head of Collections) at objects.colls@prm.ox.ac.uk

Madeleine Ding
Assistant Curator