Windrush artefacts, Covid-19 items, Ipswich Town Football Club kit and local school uniforms are among the future items set to be collected by Ipswich's museums service.
Ipswich Borough Council has this month published its museum collections development policy, which includes areas set to be prioritised for future development, agreed by the executive committee on Tuesday night.
Among the headline artefacts and items the council has said it will prioritise for collection in future are:
- Items belonging to anyone who once lived at Christchurch Mansion
- Local school uniforms
- Ipswich Town Football Club kit
- Archaeological items from in and around Ipswich around the medieval period
- Ipswich mint coins, post-medieval tokens and Iron Age, Roman or Anglo-Saxon coins of East Anglian association
- Items around the Windrush arrival in 1948
- Artefacts of the Covid-19 pandemic
- Items of weaponry carried by Suffolk soldiers during the First and Second World Wars
- Local geology considered nationally significant
- Work by female and contemporary artists
The policy said that the museum's holdings of non-British archaeological material are now considered closed, except Egyptology items which can fill gaps in the collections and sourced ethically.
However it also aims to develop items on how people worked and lived in Ipswich over recent centuries and represent more diverse backgrounds and communities in the town.
Portfolio holder for museums, Carole Jones, said: it will provide a "more varied and rounder collection".
She said: "It's important because managing our collections is a big responsibility.
"We have the themes and priorities for future collecting, and I think they are driven by the fact we are the Ipswich Museums Service.
"But we are also an important Suffolk museum, we are the museum for the county town, and also then the museum with significance for the region.
"These underpin our rationale for collecting - we want items connected to Ipswich, we want items related to Suffolk and we want to prioritise in our collecting the filling of gaps. For example, women artists and contemporary art because we don't have very much of either and it would be good to have more.
"A really nice one I think is we are looking at local school uniforms, and Ipswich Town players' kit. I am really keen to get stuff from the football team simply because it is such a recent history and resonates - it's so important to people in the town."
Items considered for acquisition by the service will be discussed by the Ipswich Museums Collections Service Working Group alongside the portfolio holder, while significant items may be referred to the council's executive.
To find out more about existing collections visit ipswich.cimuseums.org.uk
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