Smithsonian Museum Support Center
About Smithsonian Museum Support Center
The Smithsonian Institution's Museum Support Center (MSC) is a collections storage and conservation facility in Suitland, Maryland, which houses Smithsonian collections which are not on display in the museums. It is not usually open to the public, due to security concerns, though occasionally special tours are organized.
More than 54 million collections items are housed at the MSC. This comprises approximately 40 percent of the Smithsonian's collection which is not on display, while the rest of the objects are housed behind-the-scenes in the museums themselves or at other off-site storage facilities.
The collections are housed in five numbered buildings, called "pods", each about the size of a 3-story-tall football field. The pods total 435,000 square feet of collections storage space. Notable features include "enormous tanks for cleaning whale skulls, chambers to preserve Antarctic meteorites, art from throughout the ages, and a botany collection with five greenhouses".
Text from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Founded
- 1983
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Nearby museums
Make a day of it. 4 more museums are within 2.8 miles of Smithsonian Museum Support Center; the closest, Museum Conservation Institute, is practically next door.
