The Norfolk Island Museum has been running since the late 1980s. The collection and storage areas are located across six historic buildings in the World Heritage-listed Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area (KAVHA), which is one of eleven Australian Convict Sites.
The Norfolk Island Museum manages three separate collections. The first collection is comprised of First Fleet maritime archaeological objects from the flagship HMS Sirius, which wrecked here in 1790. The second collection relates to objects recovered from the KAVHA site which records the island’s initial European settlement in 1788 and then its time as a harsh penal colony in the nineteenth century. The Norfolk Island Museum Trust collection is the third collection and relates to the Mutiny of the Bounty and Pitcairn Islander story. This is the only collection that is still actively acquiring objects as it also documents life on Norfolk Island post-1856
To date the museum has over 24,000 items accessioned. In January 2018, the museum transferred its database to Vernon Collection Management System (CMS). We found the installation process and training to be of the highest quality, with easy to access technical support. Having Vernon has already enabled museum staff to link over 12,000 images to the object entries for the first time. This would have been an impossible feat without the bulk imaging tool.
Working on Vernon has also allowed the museum to begin to properly centralise our documentation – its ability to bring together research, provenance and conservation into one entry was a key reason we chose Vernon specifically. The Vernon CMS has already brought
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