The Technisches Museum Wien has a very large pool of objects dating back to the 18th century. They are only available for museum tasks once they have been inventoried and recorded according to location.
In the 1990s, the Technisches Museum Wien was cleared for general renovation. The collections were moved to several locations. In the years 2000 - 2003, the museum tackled the concentration of the depots at two locations in Vienna. It thus created a central prerequisite for the start of the depot inventory project. The other prerequisite was the electronic recording of all historical inventories of the older collections (about 150,000 records).
In 2003, the starting signal was given for the major project of an inventory of the entire object holdings in a database according to international standards. There had not been such an overall inventory since the museum was founded. The project consists of three teams dedicated to the legal mandate of collecting, preserving and indexing: First, the data is recorded and the objects inventoried with designation, dimensions, photo and location. This is followed by a basic cleaning of the objects and finally an optimisation of the object storage. After the inventory, all objects can be searched in the database with a defined standard. In addition, they are stored in a better condition than before the start of the project.
Individual objects are handed over to the depot restoration for further conservation measures in the course of the inventory. In some cases, objects containing substances that are prohibited today, e.g. asbestos, must be restored. To improve the storage conditions, investments have already been made in the depot equipment, e.g. with mobile shelving systems.
The goal of the project is the 100% registration of all collection objects. It is designed to last for many years and, depending on the necessary resources, should be completed around 2020.
