Illuminated Museum Cabinets in Exhibit Design

Display & Storage in One Cabinet

As beautiful as they are functional, Spacesaver Museum Cabinets have been blurring the lines between public and private museum spaces for decades. Now 920 Series: Preservation Cabinets are displaying collections in public exhibit spaces. With reconfigurable interiors, glass doors, locking handles for security, and optional illumination, these cabinets can bring versatility and a new level of collections protection to public areas in any museum.

In traditional museums, only a relatively small number of collections items are on exhibit at any given time. Some museums, though, are helping visitors better understand collections by putting more stored items on public display. Those museums face a challenge: visible storage needs to display items while still protecting them from dust, pests, curious museum-goers, damaging UV light, and fluctuations in heat and humidity.

“The Great Collections Experiment explores new ways of displaying and sharing more of the amazing, priceless and sometimes quirky objects in our vast collection.”

– Ohio History Center

Preservation Cabinet Versatility

To protect items while they’re on display in exhibit areas, the Ohio History Center purchased illuminated 920 Series: Preservation Cabinets to store military arms and uniforms. The cabinets’ interiors can be reconfigured in the future to display different items in the collection, and they can also be bolted together or mounted on high-density mobile systems to gain storage capacity in the future. The cabinets lock to ensure security in the public exhibit rooms.

Spacesaver provided the LED lighting, which is powered via a typical 120v/12v transformer power source with a switch. Because LED have no UV or heat output, it doesn’t damage collections like daylight or incandescent light does. The client specified the LED light temperature, which is 2700K.