Where is the depository usually located in art museums? Underground, on the first floor or on the higher floors and why?
Depository (the term) doesn’t mean much to a museum beyond The Collection, though it might be used to distinguish those items not on exhibit. I can’t think of any broad characteristics for art museum premises generalizations.
I suppose public museum exhibits tend to be on lower floors. But other items may be on loan, in storage, undergoing restoration or stabilization, etc.
Need answer fast?
Hello! Former museum (history) employee here. Many museums have a storage facility of some sort that isn’t actually housed in the museum itself. My musuem had a separate building behind the main building. Some of the other museums in my area, including the art museum next door, had another facilitiy where they stored exhibits that weren’t on display. Smaller musuems might just keep stuff in the attic or the basement.
Major art institutions would also possibly have offsite storage, since they may be quite old buildings in constrained city centre locations. A modern temperature-controlled box is cheaper and easier to build and fitout and use and secure than adapting a late 19th century gingerbread fantasy.
Thank you for all answers! Anyway I don’t rush for answers, so any new ones are good. 
Do they keep depositories in basement even if its threatened by floods (100year flood, etc.? If yes, how do they solve this risk? Anyway thank you!
Here’s something to remember, everything costs money and most public institutions have limited resources. Mine was a smaller museum and not everything we did in regards to storage was of best practice, but we did what we could. If the musuem had the resources to build/rent an off site storage facilities that’s what they’d do. If not, they’d just make due with what they had.
The Louvre used to store its reserve collections in its basements, but the risk of the Seine flooding prompted them to move them to their new Conservation Centre at Liévin.
The collections of the Uffizi and of the Archivio di Stato in Florence used to be housed in the basements of the Uffizi, but were moved to other locations after being badly damaged in the 1966 Arno flood.
The same thing had happened with the Tate Gallery in London when the Thames flooded in 1928.
The Natural History Museum has outgrown its own capacity:
The Natural History Museum is planning its largest collections move for more than a century as part of a scheme to develop a new research centre in partnership with the University of Reading.
The new centre will house the museum’s vast mammal collections, non-insect invertebrates (such as corals, crustaceans, molluscs, and worms), molecular collections and ocean bottom sediments, totalling more than 27 million specimens. The facility will also hold more than 5,500 metres of library and archive material. This equates to around a third of the museum’s collection of more than 80 million objects, making the relocation its largest collections move since the 1880s.
The centre, which is expected to be complete by 2026, will be created at the Thames Valley Science Park, which is owned and managed by the university. The aim is to deliver a low carbon building.
Museums are like icebergs - less than 10% of the collection is on display.
Our local (large) art museum has about 45,000 items, but only “several thousand” are on display at any one time. Its main building (opened in 1912) has been expanded, and adjacent buildings have been acquired/constructed over the years. I suspect many/most items not on display are stored off-site.
I don’t know why, but this has annoyed me ever since I learned about it. I get that museums have a finite space to display items, but to think that a large amount of art/history/whatever that is of high enough quality for a museum to purchase, just sits in a dark room out of site for years or even decades, just really bugs me.
From the point of view of preservation, it’s better for the artifact to sit in a cool dark place rather than the light. But a lot of museums rotate their exhibits, so some of it will see the light of day once in a while. I imagine huge museums have stuff that never sees the light of day though.
The museum I am most familiar with, Boston’s MFA, has a 22,000 square foot storage area. I have a hard time believing that anyone, even the curators, know everything that is in the facility.
That’s actually a problem in a lot of the larger, older museums. Everything at my museum was cataloged, though it was much smaller than Boston’s MFA, but I certainly didn’t know off hand exactly what I had. Even though I ran an audit each year and physically examined every artifact, there were just too many for me to remember off hand. A lot of museums have artifacts dating back to before modern museum practices regarding storage.
Most of it is not very interesting except for researchers. For most of us, if you’ve seen one flint arrowhead, you’ve seen them all; one Roman pot shard looks like all the others. Many potential exhibits are too fragile anyway.
In the UK, senior civil servants can borrow minor works of art from The National Gallery, so at least they serve a purpose.
The Smithsonian has a metric #%% ton (technical term) of pottery sherds that essentially has zero research value at this time. They weren’t extracted from acheological sites with modern techniques so their provenience is lost and they’re never going to be able to be assembled into full pieces. But you never know what technological breakthrough is around the corner that might make them useful again.
Similarly, a natural history museum is going to have things like vast numbers of insect samples.
Cataloguing is obviously critical in both managing the collection and its security [furious nods from the Directors of the British Museum] and in giving researchers access [now often with 3D high resolution imaging] without having to plod all the way to numerous museums around the world to look at comparative collections. That is the case for natural history and cultural museums as much as art galleries.
Well, ‘visible storage’ is now a big thing in the museum world. But whether this isn’t just a fad remains open to question. I’ve seen several of the major examples, including the American collections in the Met and the ceramic galleries in the V&A. They all seemed a bit pointless. This just gives most visitors more things to ignore, while the few who do have a thorough look are those specialists who would have made an appointment to see those pieces when the stuff was in storage. Far better that a display is actually ‘curated’, with the curators selecting the best, rarest or most interesting pieces and then presenting them in a way that helps visitors understand them.
Big museums are best thought of as the equivalents for artifacts of big libraries. Most of the books in the biggest research libraries are rarely used. Some will never ever be consulted. But they are there if just one researcher needs them. Of course, as Banksiaman says, digitalisation changes everything.