I think it is enlightening that in David's rebuttal to John Martinson, he
uses the standard of educational value to justify collecting. Clearly he
understands that education is the rationale for collections, as he has
stated, but somehow wants to stop short of including it in his definition of
a museum's essence.

To parallel the adroit question he quoted recently, If the essence of a
museum is in its collecting and preservation, then what is the difference
between an museum and a junkyard? (I must qualify the negative connotation
of the word junkyard by pointing out that when wearing my hat as a motion
picture production designer, I find a junkyard to be one of the most
wonderful resources in the universe)

A junkyard seeks out and collects objects of designated usefulness, and then
organizes and preserves them. And yet we must agree that a junkyard differs
more greatly in essence from a museum than a school does. Should we have
drawers and drawers full of Winston Churchill's cigar butts? We can only
answer such a question by assessing their educational value. If we decide to
define a museum's essence in it's collections, we do risk biasing our
resources toward preservation for its own sake.

My allusion to the irony of Mathematica now being classed as an historical
artifact, and therefore worthy of inclusion in a museum, when in its
original form was a collectionless exhibit (and therefore judged by David's
argument as un museumly), was directed at illustrating that such exhibits
never really are collectionless. They are in fact a collection of objects
with no specific historic merit, but great educational value.

Once again I am suggesting that we to use the etymology of Home of the Muses
as our guiding essence, and evaluate our practices based on their ability to
inspire and elucidate. BTW we have another museum here in Los Angeles that
is centered on just what David has pled for in some of his posts. The Museum
of Jurassic Technology, with it's exhibition of bogus artifacts, is in fact
a work of art that demands that we examine what we understand a museum to
be. Such examination is a wondrous and somewhat disturbing exercise, but one
that brought some of these issues into focus for me.

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