In 2001 a new Regional Resource Centre was officially opened which is located on the edge of the museum site. 

This new building houses the museum's vast core collections, built up over the past thirty years, of more than 300,000 fascinating photographs, 64,000 books and 304,000 objects. The Resource Centre has been designed and built to ensure that these regional treasures are stored and cared for in optimum conditions and for easy access.

A state of the art search room is open to all by appointment, providing wonderful facilities. The photographic archive includes glass plates, negatives, transparencies and prints dating from the earliest days of photography in the 1860s up to the present day. Every aspect of life in the North East is included in this amazing collection - families at work and play, rural life, architecture, transport and industry present a pictorial history of the region over the past 140 years. Much of the collection is computerised and can be accessed under the guidance of Beamish staff.

The huge reference library, which includes recently published books together with a wide ranging collection of late 19th and early 20th century books, trade catalogues and ephemera, offers an invaluable and unique research tool.

An ultra-modern roller racking system provides environment-controlled storage for thousands of artefacts from the Beamish collections. Thirty three racks, each 5 metres high and 15 metres deep provide the equivalent storage space of no less than eleven tennis courts!

The Resource Centre, funded with grants of £551,000 from The Heritage Lottery Fund, £300,000 from Durham County Council and £50,000 from The Cookson Trust, took seven months to build. A further three months were taken up moving the collections from Beamish Hall and various Museum stores into this wonderful new Centre.

The search room is available to all, by appointment, Monday to Friday. Please contact the Collections Access Officer on 0191 370 4000 to book an appointment.