Just some thoughts from a curator at a regional history museum:
We gets lots of "neat stuff" donated all the time, through almost never for
tax purposes. Part of my job is to appraise incoming accessions. To do that,
I do consult Kovel's, Warman's, and Warman's Americana guides (745.1 Ko,
745.1 Wa, etc. in the county library which, Luckily, happens to be right
across the street from the next-door farmers' market!)
   But the Kovel/Warman [and you could substitute whomever's] values are
to a VERY great extent tempered by ===>what that particular artifact is
worth to this particular museum.
   A suit jacket worn by Hoagy Carmichael (music legend from Bloomington!)
is appraised vastly higher than a dress worn during a movie shoot by Doris
Day (who had no Bloomington connection other then that her dress ended up
at a local thrift shop, with minimal documentation as to provenience, and we
took it on faith...).
   I guess the bottom line is, how much would it hurt us to have to replace
whatever. Many items are completely irreplaceable -- Dave Van Buskirk's
(the largest man in the Union Army: 6'10" 410 lbs., from Monroe Co., Ind.!)
custom-made chair.  But do we simply accept the going rate for a copy of
some common piece of sheet music which Warman's rates at $6.00 but which is not
espacially locally significant? I would not; but *here*, to us, sheet music
by Carmichael is vastly more important = valuable than in then general
circulation.   ==> I can well appreciate appraisal based on how much it would
 cost to send another expedition to New Guinea to collect duplicate specimens.
BUT musems don't operate that way. Certainly not minimal-budget local history
museums. ====> It's worth how significant it is to your collection. [I would
have to justify assigning a value to a Picasso in our collection; of course,
ourcollections policy would have precluded even accepting a Picasso...!]
Chris Bobbitt
Curator of Collections
Monroe County Historical Museum
Bloomington, Ind. 47408          [log in to unmask]