I'm afraid I have to disagree with some of the previous posters.
Whether or not to insure a museum collection is a serious decision and
not a simple decision.  It inter-relates with your institutions business
continuity planning and should be a Board level decision.

The first question is what would the organisation want to do in the
event of an incident.  Obviously there are a number of different types
of incident to consider including at least: damage to an object; loss of
an object; loss of the entire collection. 

Once you have the answers to these questions you can then see what
insurance would be appropriate and get costs for these.

Finally you can look at the costs of the various elements of insurance,
the risk (likelihood) of the event happening and the financial
priorities for the organisation and make a considered decision about
what insurance you want to buy.

For example if part of your collection consists of excavated
archaeological finds which you routinely acquire from excavators free of
charge insuring against total loss may be irrelevant.  A piece of Roman
pottery that you could purchase would not be an appropriate replacement
for an excavated piece.  However you probably would want to insure for
the costs of repairing damage.  (But you might find that damage only
insurance was more expensive to purchase than combined loss + damage
insurance). Also you might want to insure the packing materials (boxes
etc.) against loss as you would be to use these for future acquisitions.

If your collection is a furnished historic building your board may
decide that if the building and contents are totally destroyed they
would not want to build a replica but would want to close the
institution.  In this case total rebuilding insurance would not be
required, but what would they want to do if the building was badly
damaged?  Also there may be legal requirements to rebuild (or at least
make safe).

Your collections are at risk from loss or damage by terrorism or war.
However the risk may be very low and the cost of insurance very high.
You may well have to decide whether to insure against these risks or run
your education programmes.

If you would want to make replicas of lost objects this might cost more
than the value of the objects (apart from Buildings insurance I believe
this sort of cover is impossible to get).

Finally I should say that as a UK Government body my organisation is
prohibited from taking out insurance for its collections.  This is
because the Government self-insures.  However whether we got anything in
the event of an incident would depend on Government Ministers (and in
the event of total loss of an object we would only be able ask for money
when we had identified a suitable replacement).

Trevor Reynolds
Collections Registrar, English Heritage, Room 530, 23 Savile Row, London
W1S 2ET, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7973 3482  Fax: +44 (0) 20 7973 3209

=========================================================
Important Subscriber Information:

The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes).

If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).