Museum Support Center

The Museum Support Center (MSC) is the principal off-site conservation and collections storage facility for the National Museum of Natural History’s irreplaceable national collections. One of the first such facilities in the world, MSC was designed to address the needs of collections storage, conservation, and research. Located in Suitland, Maryland, this state-of-the-art facility houses more than 31 million objects.

MSC is home to the Biorepository Center, the Laboratories of Analytical Biology (LAB), the Smithsonian's Museum Conservation Institute (MCI), and numerous department collections from the National Museum of Natural History. It also houses collections from the Hirshorn Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the National Anthropological Archives.