Visible storage

Many museums and galleries have over 90% of their collections in storage at any one time and the technique has been widely adopted recently by institutions ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to London's Victoria & Albert Museum as well as in many smaller collections.

Visible storage cases tend to be densely packed and with less explanatory material than in conventional displays.

In addition, they may exceed head height making smaller objects difficult to see.

The cases may be curving, cylindrical, packed closely together or positioned down the centre of existing galleries.

[1] The Metropolitan Museum of Art was one of the first large institutions to use visible storage when it created the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art in 1988[2] and the Victoria & Albert Museum has recently adopted the idea in their ceramics galleries.