History is never far from our collections. We have objects from about 1910 to the end of the 20th century, ranging from large planes to tiny ear puncturing needles. And each one has its own special tale to recount about Swedish Air Force life.
Artefacts from collections and closures
The collection of artefacts was begun in the 1940s by Gösta von Porat and Hugo Beckhammar, both senior officers in the Malmen Wing. Subsequently, a large part of the Swedish Air Force Museum’s artefacts came to us through the extensive wave of closures of Swedish Air Force Wings, primarily in the 1970s and 1980s.
Today, we who work with the collection try to be more restrictive in accepting objects, and instead direct our effects to filling the historical gaps in the collection.
Working with artefacts
Work with artefacts can involve quick changes. One minute you may be wearing cotton gloves, carefully moving an object from a box to a shelf, and a short time later, you’ll be driving an industrial truck, moving pallets or transporting objects in a tractor-trailer. You can also spend an entire day photographing and registering artefacts, or doing research to find out the correct facts about each object.
Registration with Primus
Registration of an object means that it is no longer an article to be used, but has become a museum artefact and must therefore be treated in a certain way.
Registration means that artefacts are entered into Primus, our registration program, which gives each artefact a unique identifying number. We add considerable data, such as where the object is to be placed, as well as its uses. Briefly, we tell the story of each object up to the time we received it. This helps us determine what we have and where it should go.
We also sort out a large number of objects, which we send to other museums. Currently, we have a total of about 25,000 objects entered in the system, but we have around ten times as many waiting to be inventoried, registered and sorted.
Now that the Swedish Air Force Museum has Primus, we will eventually be able to offer the public the opportunity to perform direct searches of our collection right on our website.