Andrea,

Heart palpitations?  How about a massive heart attack?

What do they mean by "full access" to your collection room?  Having had
long experience with use of collections in a University museum, I assure
you, this has unacceptable risks unless you can fully control access to
(and use of) the collections. No one but you and campus security should
have a key to the storage room, and you would have to always be on site
and supervising ANY use of the collections.  YOU have to decide what can
be handled by a class of students and what can't. YOU have to decide
when and what you will loan to a faculty member to take to a class, and
what the rules for handling are.  Do this using a standard loan form,
with responsibility accruing to an individual faculty member only, and
absolutely NO students (they tend to vanish) and NOT a Department or
other group entity. Make it clear that the faculty member is
*personally* fully responsible for the return of the item in the
condition in which it was loaned, and is personally responsible for any
loss or damage. Make the loan for no longer time period than absolutely
necessary. Most important is to be clear from the get-go that you will
NOT allow use of artifacts as play props. (Use should be limited to
teaching and research purposes.)  Make it clear that use and loan
decisions are yours and yours alone, on a case by case basis, according
to the condition, fragility, etc. of the artifact.

Believe me, if you don't let them know in the clearest of terms that
your collections are precious and irreplaceable, and if you don't take
every step to protect those collections, the college folks will not
treat them with any more respect than you do, and you will incur
handling damage as well as "mysterious disappearances".

Realize that many lay people regard a museum as a sort of lending
library of objects, with as little regard. Lost book? well you just pay
for it. (Be sure to include a valuation on every loan, that may give
them pause)  Damaged pages? close the book and no one will notice,
etc....

Since you are in the negotiation stage, you also should ask for some
sort of reasonable charge for collection use, to compensate for your
time and effort to find what they want, get things out of storage,
return them to storage, etc. (Each loan or on site class use can consume
a considerable number of hours of your time, which isn't free, I assume.
At the University where I was all Departments charged one another for
services such as physical plant repairs, printing department, photo lab,
computer services, etc. so they may not find this out of line.  This
might reduce wanton use and excessive demands, and also provide
compensation for the inevitable loss and damage that you almost
certainly will incur.

As you can tell, I come from the school of experience on this one. It
may turn out that their generous "free" offer could become quite
costly!!

Lucy Sperlin
Historic Patrick Ranch
Chico, CA





Andrea Mercado wrote:
>
> Our museum has been generously given off-site collection storage from
> a nearby college. Our museum is not ideal for collection storage and
> the college's space is climate-controlled and spacious.   We have no
> contract as of yet, and are entering conversations about how best to
> develop our relationship.
>
> We are being approached because they would like full access of our
> collection room to their students.  This gives me heart-palpitations,
> and so I am looking for alternative ideas that have worked for other
> organizations.  Has anyone developed a relationship of this
> manner?  An idea of ours is to put our collection online (or at least
> accessible through the college library). .  We would love more....
> We are a small, part-time staffed organization (so being available for
> assisted collection entry will be much less than full-time hours).
>
> Thank you,
> Andrea Mercado
> The Log House Museum~SW Seattle Historical Society
>
>
>
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