There are really two issues here:

1)  volunteer management and clearly communicating what the work is and how
it is to be done

and

2)  a collections management policy that clearly states guidelines for the
care, restoration and use of operating machinery (this could also include
use of antique tools, musical instruments, scientific instruments, clocks,
etc.).

I would argue that the first goal is to make sure that your institution has
a clear collections management policy.  As has been pointed out, there are
many institutions that have wrestled with this issue and come up with good
guidelines that you may want to use as an example.  AIC and the Canadian
Conservation Institute both have guidelines that will be useful.  We can go
back and forth as to whether one should restore antique equipment to
operational status (basic pro:  it shows our visitors how it worked and how
it was used; basic con:  restoration to operational status destroys original
material that is useful for understanding how the object was made,
decorated, etc.), but unless you have a clear policy, you and your
volunteers will not have any standard against which to work.

You might find it helpful to look at "Tiering Agricultural Machinery
Collections: A Canadian Philosophy," a paper that was published in the 1990
"Proceedings" of the Association of Living History, Farm and Agricultural
Museums.  The author of the article, Franz Klingender, who is curator of
agriculture at the Canadian Agricultural Museum in Ottawa, has to deal with
this issue on a regular basis and has given a lot of thought to it.  You
might also want to search the on-line index of the "Proceedings" to see if
there are other papers that could be useful to you
http://www.alhfam.org/?cat_id=179&nav_tree=96,102,179.

Once you have your policy in place, you can then set the standards for the
volunteers.  If they understand why the policy is there and the goals of the
policy, then it may be easier to have them work within the guidelines you've
set for them.  Helping volunteers understand the goals behind the
collections management policy can go a long way, I think, in their working
to those standards.  Yes, there is the issue of credibility, and I don't
know how to easily deal with this.  But you, or the director, are their
supervisor.  As another response noted, you have standards for the work that
volunteers do, and if they can't/won't/refuse to adhere to the standards you
set, then you have to find a way to gracefully suggest that they find
another way that they can help the museum.

I know it's not as simple as this, especially because they've been basically
doing pretty much what they've wanted to do for a long time.  But I hope
that thinking about the problem as I've outlined above can help somewhat.

Hope this helps.

Martha Katz-Hyman
Independent Curator

=========================================================
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).