Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Landscaping

 
It's a monumental week for the Sustainable Archaeology Research centre at UWO. We've completed all of the requirements for our Occupancy Permit and once the paperwork has been filed with the City of London, our doors will be open! The interior of the building is now complete - and the landscaping will be finished by Wednesday. This is a view of the west side of the Research centre - the view that faces Wonderland Road, a main thoroughfare through the City. The dirt will be sprayed with hydro seed, and given the cooler temperatures and increased precipitation from what we were experiencing earlier this summer, it is expected that the seed should take quite quickly. A year ago we were asking the General Contractor (Tonda) to please hold off on ground-breaking until after the Museum's Harvest Festival - this year we're asking them to please finish up before the Festival commences this weekend. So the construction process as been a full year in the works!

It's time for us to turn our attention towards the next phase of the project's development - the digital database. We have been working on policy documents over the summer and roughing out our collections guidelines. This process, along with the actual construction of the database itself, will be ongoing throughout the fall and winter months. By January, we aim to have a beta database set up for testing with a goal towards accepting our first collections by early spring.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Visualization Gallery

 
The new Octoterra wall has been installed in the Visualization room (that's a bunch of twigs in cross-section, though the detail is lost at this scale) - bringing all of the rooms in the new facility to completion. Landscaping begins on Tuesday after the Labour Day long weekend. Over the next couple of weeks the touch-ups will be made that will make the facility picture-perfect for its community debut during the Doors Open London event on the 17-18th of the month. If you're local, stop by and take a look at what we've been up to. Over the next few months we will be furnishing the facility with equipment and working on getting the digital database up and running.