Meet a woman who's been given the job to move a whole museum. It's taking a very long time, and it's a very slow, difficult process.


JENNIFER STORER, TASMANIAN MUSEUM & ART GALLERY: It's been a huge job. We've been moving - if you can imagine a 50sqm footprint of collections, however tall they are - about that every fortnight and we do that just with myself. I have a colleague who really specialises in the logistics side of things and four people, four days a week, and that's how we move.

RICHARD DAVIS: More than 500,000 items are being moved from the museum to Rosny.

It will provide more room at the city site and a better place to store the precious artefacts.

It's a slow, careful process that's expected to take two years to complete.

JENNIFER STORER: Well, we're in the dry invertebrate zoology section of the museum and as you can see it goes on forever and as part of the collection there are many beetles and butterflies.

And I thought if I showed you some here, and you can see I'm pulling them out very delicately.

RICHARD DAVIS: How difficult is it to move something as delicate as this?

JENNIFER STORER: It's incredibly difficult. If you look very closely at some specimens, you can see they've only got usually one pin pinning them on the board and this is a study collection.

A lot of it won't go on display and so the scientists want the whole specimen to study. And a specimen without its antennae or without its legs or anything is pretty useless, so it had to be an incredibly delicate operation so we took it very, very slowly.

RICHARD DAVIS: And it's a big job to keep track of such a large collection.

JENNIFER STORER: We utilise modern technology. The straight-forward, very simple methods are usually the best. So things like the bar code on the back of your soup can, we've utilised that barcoding system, that's very common elsewhere, to track things because we literally have to know what leaves, what's on the truck, should, god forbid, it goes over the bridge and never comes back. And then it comes here, so that we can locate things literally down to a shelf which we've never been able to do before.

RICHARD DAVIS: With every house move, people tend to lose something. Have you lost anything?

JENNIFER STORER: No, actually on the contrary, we've found things - things that have been missing. It's an excuse to do your pantry inventory of everything and that's been really good and I've loved it because we can be so closely involved in it. It's a really good way of getting to know the collections intimately.

RICHARD DAVIS: In the new building, room after room is filled with shelves, crammed with creepy crawlies and historic artefacts. There's even some former man-eaters.

JENNIFER STORER: The mere fact that we can lay our finger on it much easier now with this process, it means when people come looking for things we'll be able to find them very quickly, and the curators can work better with their collections, so that they can develop our own exhibitions from our own fantastic Tasmanian collections to put in our Tasmanian Museum and Gallery.