Goods Morning Everyone,
I'm in the preliminary stages of trying to calculate a rough insurance 
value for our College's Ethnographic and Archaeological collections and 
was hoping some of you might be able to give me some 
assistance/direction on possible strategies for approaching this 
project.  As it currently stands, the only coverage that our collections 
have is that which covers the actual facility the collections are housed 
in.  As you can guess this is woefully inadequate.  I'm preparing an 
informational document to provide the administration with some ballpark 
figures to determine the best way to insure our collections, i.e. 
increasing facility insurance coverage or separate coverage for the 
collections themselves.

The Anthropology collections are split into two main components; 
Ethnography and Archaeology.  The Ethnographic collection includes 1100 
objects including the standard Native American bead work, basketry, and 
hunting/fishing technology as well as material culture from Africa, 
Asia, and the Central Pacific Islands.  The Archaeological Collections 
contain in excess of 1 million artifacts - primarily from Iowa, 
Wisconsin, and Missouri - representing everything from Paleoindian to 
historic sites.

One possibility is to calculate the insurance value of the 
archaeological collections by multiplying the number of boxes by a 
percentage of our curation/repository fee, but that seems extremely 
arbitrary considering the broad range of artifacts we curate.  Likewise, 
I'm uneasy about using auction catalogs or Ebay as an indicator for the 
value of our ethnographic collections.  Can anyone point me to some 
resources or articles about this process?  Any information, anecdotal or 
otherwise, would be greatly appreciated.  Feel free to contact me 
off-list if you prefer.
Thank You
Chad Landsman


-- 
Chad W Landsman	
Lab & Collections Manager
Anthropology Laboratory

Luther College 
700 College Drive
Decorah, IA 52101
(563)387-2156

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