A Peek into the Vault: Visiting the Money and Medals Department
Written by Keagan Edwards, Museum & Archives Attendant (Curatorial), MONOVA: Museum & Archives of North Vancouver (Canada, ITP 2026)
Hello everyone! My name is Keagan Edwards, and I am the Museum & Archives Attendant (Curatorial) at MONOVA: Museum & Archives of North Vancouver. I am from Vancouver, Canada, and to say I’m not used to this London heat would be an understatement. But don’t worry, I’m managing to survive. 🙂 I am so excited and honoured to be part of the ITP 2026 team. I’m hoping to learn as much as I can from the museum professionals here at the British Museum and to bring that knowledge back to my home institution. I can’t wait to see what the program has in store for us.
To start our second week of the ITP programme, we were joined by the Money and Medals department. We began the day with a presentation from Tom Hockenhull, Keeper of Money and Medals, who gave us an overview of the department including its founder, the size and scope of the collections, etc. Tom then took us on a tour of the Money and Medals gallery. The most memorable part of the day was viewing their storage and seeing their collection of ancient coins up close, including how they’re stored. To my surprise, they’re kept in small wooden trays inside small wooden boxes. It was also fascinating to see how the coins are labelled. Overall, seeing the Money and Medals storage space was a truly unique experience.
We ended the day with presentations from the Collections Documentation and Registration team, who gave us a quick overview of each of their roles, including cataloguing, acquisitions, long-term loans, auditing, etc. It was interesting to learn about their large-scale digitisation project, which aims to digitise three million objects by the end of 2028. At my home institution, we can fall behind on digitising our collections due to other various projects arising however, learning that the British Museum is also behind on this work puts things into perspective for me. Falling behind on digitisation seems to be a very common trend amongst museums around the world.
As we toured the Money and Medals storage, I couldn’t help but think what a privilege this is for us. These are spaces the public never gets to see, and getting up close and personal with the collections and department team members is something I never imagined for myself as a museum professional.
