If you can't get around this by explaining your policies, etc. and you absolutely don't want to say no to the donation you can try doing what we did when faced with a similar situation. We were told by the "powers that be" that we would take a specific donation and the family had deaccession restrictions as well. They basically wanted us to contact every single family member, siblings, cousins, aunts & uncles, the family dog, etc. in perpetuity if we were to ever deaccession the items and give them back to some family member. Well after MUCH negotiation and frustration on the staff's part we were finally able to come to a compromise where we agreed to notify a specific set of people (I think 6 different people) if we were going to deaccession the items in the next 25 years and that the people specified were responsible for keeping us up to date with their current contact information. As this was a very good collection with a good history this should never be a problem, baring any catastrophic event, I can't see why we would ever want to deaccession the items. It was the principle of the matter and trying to avoid setting a precedent that the staff was fighting, but given we had no choice we felt limiting the number of people to contact, putting the burden on them to keep us informed of their information, and setting a time limit to these conditions on the donation was the best thing we could do given the situation.



Mandy Langfald
Curator of Collection
Wyoming State Museum
307-777-7033
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