Dear Young Museum Professional --

Lack of space is a problem for nearly every museum everywhere and it is responsible to cull items that are outside your scope of collecting or lack proper documentation so that you can properly care for the items that should be there.  

You mention that the museum's mission does not include international items but does it include a local angle -- the life of local individuals who made tours abroad whether for pleasure, business or due to military service? or the lives of immigrants to your area -- the culture they left behind or the culture they brought with them?  

> We are currently in possession of a great number of international
> artifacts/items/memorabilia….we are not and [AN?] international
> institution and have no need or desire to keep these items.   

Before proceeding, try to determine how this "great number" of items came your way.  Have you any idea how long these materials have been accumulating?  Even when documentation does not exist in a file or catalog labelled accessions in the registrar's office, don't assume that it does not exist elsewhere. It would be a good idea to take a look in monthly or annual reports, curator's or director's office correspondence, or other official museum documents to see if you cannot determine why your museum should have become the beneficiary of such largesse.  If you have a clipping file of newspaper articles about your museum, check there -- this  is often a useful source of information about things that don't quite come to fruition.  Have you contacted current and former staff and volunteers for assistance in tracking down the documentation?  

Is there any way of telling if the items you want to dispose of were all part of a single donation?  Oftentimes, that's why an unaccessioned/uncataloged mass of material shows up when inventorying -- a very large gift suddenly descending upon an understaffed museum, or one which lacks curatorial expertise in the subject matter often winds up getting tucked away in the hopes that someday there will be time to tackle the material, or staff expertise to appraise its merit.  It's not impossible that a lawyer (or the heirs) settling an estate failed to return a deed of gift or leave a copy of the will.  Frequently such gifts get a newspaper article so check that file, too.

There's another possibility for the missing explanation(s) for the international material -- did a former staff member take the relevant information home, intending to continue working on it from there after retirement, only to have illness or a move interfere with these plans.   It shouldn't happen but it does.  Something like this happened to me -- about 4 months after I had surgery and left the museum where I'd worked for more than 30 years, 16 boxes of "personal" material were delivered to my home.  It took a while until I was up to going through the boxes, but when I did, I discovered all sorts of newsletters, books and office files that belonged to the museum.  Since I'd spent  years trying to find such items that had vanished after other staff members departures during my tenure, I went through everything very carefully and returned nearly 1/3 of the number of boxes, with notes explaining why the files should stay at the museum.  All books and
 newsletters were clearly marked with the museum's property stamps but apparently the person who was given the chore of clearing out my office was too harried to notice.

Yet another possibility is that these international artifacts were purposely solicited from a number of donors or acquired with a specific project such as an exhibit in mind.  Since they were never intended to be part of the permanent collection, they were not accessioned, but were considered long-term loans.  If the international items reflect the ethnic heritage of your community, this is a real possibility for an explanation of how they reached you. 

As you've described the problem, it seems a bit strange that  multiple donors would get the idea the museum needed foreign artifacts independently.  So it's best to cover all bases and make certain this was not something the museum was organizing once upon a time.  

On a more practical level, you mention the museum's mission so I assume there's a formal mission statement but you don't mention your collection policy or scope of collections statement.
You need to have all these documents with Board review and approval clearly noted.    This should make things easier in the future.  

It's also good policy to make sure the Board  supports your current efforts to clear things out, perhaps by presenting it as an effort to clear up questions of title and provenance.  If there is serious opposition to disposing of these items, then perhaps you can use that as the basis of an effort to obtain more space (which any museum that collections items is bound to need, sooner or later.)

Judy Turner
Whitefish Bay, WI


      

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