I'm afraid I have to disagree with some of the previous posters. Whether or not to insure a museum collection is a serious decision and not a simple decision. It inter-relates with your institutions business continuity planning and should be a Board level decision. The first question is what would the organisation want to do in the event of an incident. Obviously there are a number of different types of incident to consider including at least: damage to an object; loss of an object; loss of the entire collection. Once you have the answers to these questions you can then see what insurance would be appropriate and get costs for these. Finally you can look at the costs of the various elements of insurance, the risk (likelihood) of the event happening and the financial priorities for the organisation and make a considered decision about what insurance you want to buy. For example if part of your collection consists of excavated archaeological finds which you routinely acquire from excavators free of charge insuring against total loss may be irrelevant. A piece of Roman pottery that you could purchase would not be an appropriate replacement for an excavated piece. However you probably would want to insure for the costs of repairing damage. (But you might find that damage only insurance was more expensive to purchase than combined loss + damage insurance). Also you might want to insure the packing materials (boxes etc.) against loss as you would be to use these for future acquisitions. If your collection is a furnished historic building your board may decide that if the building and contents are totally destroyed they would not want to build a replica but would want to close the institution. In this case total rebuilding insurance would not be required, but what would they want to do if the building was badly damaged? Also there may be legal requirements to rebuild (or at least make safe). Your collections are at risk from loss or damage by terrorism or war. However the risk may be very low and the cost of insurance very high. You may well have to decide whether to insure against these risks or run your education programmes. If you would want to make replicas of lost objects this might cost more than the value of the objects (apart from Buildings insurance I believe this sort of cover is impossible to get). Finally I should say that as a UK Government body my organisation is prohibited from taking out insurance for its collections. This is because the Government self-insures. However whether we got anything in the event of an incident would depend on Government Ministers (and in the event of total loss of an object we would only be able ask for money when we had identified a suitable replacement). Trevor Reynolds Collections Registrar, English Heritage, Room 530, 23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET, United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0) 20 7973 3482 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7973 3209 ========================================================= 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).