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