The Maple Ridge Museum will soon be moving its artifacts - again.

It might be Heritage Week, whereby all things historical are celebrated locally and across the province, but the Maple Ridge Museum has to deal with a more pressing problem: where to put some of its archives and artifacts.

Museum staff was storing archives and artifacts at Webster's Corners Elementary but when the classroom they were using was needed for other purposes, the Maple Ridge Teachers' Association offered temporary space in their Fraser Street Building.

But that has been rented to a bicycle repairman and the museum is once again "plunged" into a storage crisis, said museum director Val Patenaude.

"It's not working for us hip-hopping around town," Patenaude said. "We're going to have to fundraise for storage or we'll have to stop collecting. History doesn't stop."

Patenaude has rented a new storage facility in the Hammond business park area, a permanent place for items like an old sewing machine, period costumes, Molly Buckerfield's saddles, a welding machine, and boxes filled with paperwork.

Recent acquisitions the museum received were the original Albion Hall signs, about 12 feet in length, that were saved when the building was torn down last spring and that are currently stored in MRTA building and will be moved into a rented storage space.

But the storage space will cost $3,500 a year, and Patenaude said they need to start fundraising to get that money in place.

The museum's mandate is to collect and archive historical information about Maple Ridge - anything that tells a story about Maple Ridge - but the amount of material they have cannot fit into the building that houses the museum, formerly the residence of the manager of the Port Haney Brick & Tile company,.

"We have to keep collecting [but] we have no place to store it," Patenaude said And the storage space has to be for the long term.

"It's gotta be a decade - we have to be thinking a decade ahead," Patenaude said.

Currently, the museum should be collecting artifacts from the 1950s and 1960s, but soon they should also start collecting from the '70, '80s, and '90s.

A new museum is not on Maple Ridge's five-year capital plan, and Patenaude said that's the "crucial piece" to get fundraising in place.

Until a new museum is put into the District's five-year plan, the museum cannot apply for large federal and provincial grants for the museum construction.

"You cannot fundraise into a vacuum," Patenaude said.

Maple Ridge Mayor Ernie Daykin said he's a "huge proponent" of keeping historical information, but council is faced with "competing priorities" for municipal dollars.

The "easy part" would be raising the capital cost of building the museum, but the harder part would be the ongoing costs.

"It's not just the capital costs [to build a museum], it's the ongoing maintenance or operational cost that needs to be built in," Daykin said.

The museum issue has been on the back burner for a while, Daykin said, and he said he's willing to admit it's been a "challenge" in the community for a long time.

"It's something that council can discuss again during the business planning cycle," he said. Business planning for 2013 when the five-year plan is again reviewed begins in early spring.

Daykin pointed out that the muncipality spends hundred of thousands of dollars subsidizing sports, arts, accessibility, and those are the things that "make a community a community."

A new museum would definitely also help make the community a great place, he added.

While Patenaude said she feels the community values its historical society, residents need to let the politicians and bureaucrats know that it is an important issue.

"The more voices we have, the stronger we are," she said.

After the property next to the current museum was bought about a decade ago for a new building, the historical society hired an architect and a concept plan was developed.

"Then everything ground to a halt," Patenadue said, and currently the new museum is a "well thought-out dream."

"We just got pushed to the back of the line."

A site for the new museum is currently on 116th Avenue next to the old one, but Patenaude worries about the cost of building on that lot given that it slopes and has a clay base.

She would prefer the new museum be built near Memorial Peace Park (last year, the historical society proposed that it could be built on a vacant lot next to the park, which was eventually incorporated as part of the park.)

"You'd get a lot more bang for your buck buidling on flat land with parking under it," Patenaude said.

To celebrate heritage week, local historian Don Waite will be speaking to the historical society on Thursday, sharing research on a new book about " the men who moil for gold." The talk takes place at St. Andrew's Heritage Church at 22279 116th Ave.