Mariners Museum

One of the two operational tenets of the "collections-based" prong of our strategy is "conservation" of the art, artifacts, and archival material of the mariners' museum collection ("heritage conservation") and of the "living collection" the forest, lake, and wildlife - within mariners' park ("environmental conservation"). Highlights from heritage conservation work in 2024 feature the relocation of the museum's nearly 90 figureheads as well as over two dozen sternboards with the goal of improving the preventive care of these important collections. Team members from multiple museum departments built out storage for these relocated collections actually within museum galleries, simultaneously improving community access to the collections. Contemporaneously, the museum's digitization and archival teams launched an in-house digitization project funded by a "save america's treasures" grant. Nearly 13,500 negatives were digitized from the a. Aubrey bodine and edwin levick collections. The mariners' park team and our conservation scientist continued active water quality testing of our 167-acre mariners' lake, a program that shows our stormwater-fed lake remains healthy. Our forest management team continued the removal of hazard trees along public trails within mariners' park, and sustained earlier invasive-species removal efforts within the forest.

One of the two operational tenets of the "collections-based" prong of our strategy is "research, or "building the body of knowledge" about the mariners' museum's vast maritime archival collection (an estimated 2 million archival pieces), maritime library (over 100,000 volumes), maritime art collection (thousands of paintings and works on paper), and maritime artifact collection, and about the "living collection" the forest, lake, and wildlife within mariners' park. In 2024, our conservation research scientist, in collaboration with a conservation science fellow, further refined an approach to capture and/or mitigate the effects of sulphur trapped in waterlogged archaeological wood. This problem, untreated, manifests itself in the development of sulfuric acid when formerly waterlogged archaeological wood that is dried and displayed - a particularly thorny problem for recovered and conserved historic shipwrecks globally. Our archival team and curatorial team improved the cataloging of significant portions of our archive, photographic, and artifact collections, with a particular emphasis on capturing the human stories that live within these collection items. We regularly host partner researchers from higher education institutions and other types of institutions within the mariners' park, and in 2024 established, for the first time, a formal research liaison and manager to support this type of research in the living collection and begin designing a system for aggregating and disseminating that research.