Hopefully, I'm not clogging up everyone's e-mail with another similar
posting on this thread (Candace, Nikkie, Audra and Lucy have made most
of the salient points), but my slow fingers started this message before
Lucy's post came up, and darn it, after the effort to produce this
message, I wanna post it!

Trent is are absolutely right that deaccessioning is a treatment rather
than a cure.  However, the cure--better collections policy--has been
adopted by the majority of museums across North America as a result of
increased professionalism since the 1960s.  Deaccessioning was and is a
sensitive issue, for all concerned--many curators/collections managers
were brought up in the profession with a distinct "never deaccession!"
attitude, and have their own bias against culling collections, to say
nothing of how donors and the general public might perceive
deaccessioning.  As a result, many items that should have been disposed
of as collections policies and mandates were clarified have been
languishing in storage for decades, and now really do need to be cleared
away.  But to say that an initial deaccession to clear up these items
should be the only deaccessioning that needs to be done is really
oversimplifying the situation.

It's easy to say that once you have one or two examples of an item,
don't take anymore--but what if, say, you took the first two treadle
sewing machines offered to you, with no provenance, simply because they
fill a gap in your material culture collections?  Then, you're offered
the first treadle machine that came to your community, complete with
original shipping materials, invoices, photographs and newspaper
clippings heralding its arrival.  It would be a disservice to the
community to not accept the piece with the greater provenance, just
because you already have your quota in that object type.  But then, you
find you do have a surplus sewing machine, taking up valuable storage
space and requiring additional staff time to inventory, condition
report, etc.  So what do you do?

Also, I know that our collection for one has never been systematically
researched--a lot of times, the only provenance we know is what the
donors tell us.  As it turns out, we have a collection of arrows once
described as Blackfoot, but now we know are unquestionably Japanese.  We
recently accepted a baptismal font because we believe it may have been
the first one in town--what if another one we don't now know about
surfaces that is older?  If we were to take another one, it would bring
our number of fonts to four--a bit much for a general social history
museum like us to accommodate.

In short, occasional deaccessioning, when handled properly, is an
essential part of collections management, just as proper pruning of a
tree is needed to keep it healthy.


------------------------------------------------------------
Tim McShane, Assistant--Cultural History
Medicine Hat Museum and Art Gallery
1302 Bomford Crescent S.W.
Medicine Hat, AB   T1A 5E6
(403) 502-8587

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