our system is composed of five museums - 3  collecting plus a non-collecting
children's museum and an historic house that has a "closed" collection -
everything in it is original to the family who lived there. We have a
collections policy and mandate for each museum - a staff acquisition
committee meets on a regular basis made up of myself as manager of the
museums, a conservator and the curator of the historic house non-collecting
museum. Curators of collecting museums make a presentation before the acq.
committee discussing the relevance of the object(s) in question to their
mandate (very important document) , how it will be used ie will it go on
display or in storage, how many others do we have in collection, is this a
better example of something we already have in the collection, do we have
enough storage space, the conservator examines the object(s) to determine
their condition (if needs work then we determine if it is that important to
our collection and  do we have the funds to conserve etc) after discussion
with the group a decision is made and a report completed. Our board at this
time is not involved - several years ago we had a policy which stated that
Board members were not to acquire objects - had experience with some
accepting items that we do not need or have several or etc.
Hope this helps!
-----Original Message-----
From: Sheldon Museum, Haines AK [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: January 2, 2001 10:18 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject:


Question:  We are revisiting our acquisitons process and i am very
interested in learning the procedure other museums use in determining what
items should or should not be in their collections.
Do you have a committee?  If so, what is it's composition
(staff/board/members/community at large/ combination of above)?  Is your
procedure the same for all items, or is it different for different types of
items (objects, books, archival, etc) or value of items?

Thanks for your input.  This is important as we need to make changes.  The
Museum recently acquired the collection from the Chilkat Valley Historical
Society and their process needs to be modified somewhat to fit our
organization.

CJ

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