This week Leeds Museums and Galleries hosted a visiting delegation from the South Korean Capital City, Seoul.
The delegation, which included Seoul’s Director of Museums, was taken on a tour of Leeds City Museum and the Leeds Discovery Centre to find out more about how the Museums and Galleries service use the buildings to store and display the city’s diverse range of artefacts, which include an elephant skull, a medieval log boat and remains from a Dodo!
The £6 million Discovery Centre, which opened in 2007, has a special climate control system which keeps different zones of the building at precise temperatures and humidity levels, providing the ideal conditions to store over 1 million different objects.
The delegation had identified Leeds’ state of the art Discovery Centre as one of the key sites they wanted to visit during their trip to the UK. The learnings from their visit will help support the construction of a similar building in Seoul.
Commenting on the visit Head of Collections and Programmes at Leeds Museums and Galleries, Yvonne Hardman said: “The visit was a fantastic opportunity to showcase Leeds Discovery Centre to an international audience.”
“Leeds Museums and Galleries is the largest local authority museums service in England and that means that we have a large number of artefacts that need to be stored in the ideal conditions for their long term care. The Centre provides an invaluable space that allows us to safely preserve these objects and at the same time provide public access to the wonderful collections we have here in Leeds. Drop-in tours of the collections store take place every Thursday at 11am and 2pm, so anyone has the opportunity to come and look around.”