ABSTRACT
The visible storage model of museum presentation has recently received an increasing amount of attention in Canada and elsewhere. Interest in it has arisen from the development in the 1960s and 1970s of an ideal based on the ‘democratization’ of museum collections.1 According to that ideal, because the public is the true owner of the collections, it should have full access to all museum resources. In some quarters, a perception exists that museums have been ‘hiding all the good stuff in storage for the exclusive use of curators and scholars.2 The visible storage concept is seen as a ‘radical’ departure from the contemporary museum model and is an attempt to open up all of the museum’s resources to the public-to ‘democratize’ the whole enterprise. The philosophy has now been widely accepted in the museum community. Whether the visible storage approach is the best means of carrying out this philosophy remains to be determined.
