Goods Morning Everyone, I'm in the preliminary stages of trying to calculate a rough insurance value for our College's Ethnographic and Archaeological collections and was hoping some of you might be able to give me some assistance/direction on possible strategies for approaching this project. As it currently stands, the only coverage that our collections have is that which covers the actual facility the collections are housed in. As you can guess this is woefully inadequate. I'm preparing an informational document to provide the administration with some ballpark figures to determine the best way to insure our collections, i.e. increasing facility insurance coverage or separate coverage for the collections themselves. The Anthropology collections are split into two main components; Ethnography and Archaeology. The Ethnographic collection includes 1100 objects including the standard Native American bead work, basketry, and hunting/fishing technology as well as material culture from Africa, Asia, and the Central Pacific Islands. The Archaeological Collections contain in excess of 1 million artifacts - primarily from Iowa, Wisconsin, and Missouri - representing everything from Paleoindian to historic sites. One possibility is to calculate the insurance value of the archaeological collections by multiplying the number of boxes by a percentage of our curation/repository fee, but that seems extremely arbitrary considering the broad range of artifacts we curate. Likewise, I'm uneasy about using auction catalogs or Ebay as an indicator for the value of our ethnographic collections. Can anyone point me to some resources or articles about this process? Any information, anecdotal or otherwise, would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to contact me off-list if you prefer. Thank You Chad Landsman -- Chad W Landsman Lab & Collections Manager Anthropology Laboratory Luther College 700 College Drive Decorah, IA 52101 (563)387-2156 ========================================================= 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).