Mary Swift - Collections Assistant, Maritime Museum of British Columbia, Discussing the significance of museum collections when learning about maritime history

People use objects and it's how objects are used that tell the story of how people interact with their environment or use their environment to further their knowledge. Every story is connected to a person and it's those stories that make artifacts interesting and tell the history. If you just have an artifact, you don't know where it came from or what it was used for unless you get the history, unless it's in the context of who used it and how it was used.