The Museum of the Highwood has taken a big step in protecting its collection.

At the Board's Annual General Meeting, Curator Irene Kerr talked about their purchase of a new building for their artifacts.

"The Board of Directors purchased an off-site building for an off-site storage facility so we're pretty excited about finally having a safe and environmentally proper facility to store all of this beautifully restored material," Kerr says. "In a museum collection it's not necessarily the temperature and humidity on any given day it's the fact that it changes and in High River in May and June the humidity goes crazy."

She says the collection used to be housed in an old Secan container that leaked and in the basement of the Highwood Memorial Centre but for insurance purposes they can't keep items in a basement.

"The Flood Recovery Team, that's funded by the Alberta Museums Association, have been doing a lot of amazing work restoring our collection, cataloguing it and re-housing it," she says.

Kerr says she recently got a look at a tray that had been presented by the Alberta government to Billy Henry in 1967 when he turned 100 years old, Canada's Centennial year.

She says it looked pretty rough after the flood and now it looks amazing.

She's looking forward to getting the artifacts into their new facility.