We have been charging for research for approximately the last 5 years.
Although, we do not normally charge PhD researchers. We started out
charging $50.00 per hour, although the first 1/2 hour is usually free. The
clients or researchers that we normally charge are people from the film
Industry who can take an excessive amount of time, and we see no return for
the service, or book publisher, who send generic requests, and we end up
having to do their research and select photographs or objects for their
publications. I have not really seen much difference in who uses the
collections or the library, by doing this charge.

We also charge $50.00 an hour  to pull objects from the collections for
photography, plus all of the photographer's fees, because we do not have a
photographer on staff.

On Tuesday, September 08, 1998 5:58 AM, Alain Marc & Chris Keeler
[SMTP:[log in to unmask]] wrote:
> A recent posting to the list stated that a Hawaiian museum proposed to
> charge a PhD researcher $50 per hour for time spent working on the
> collection.  Is this sort of charge becoming a common practice?  I'd be
> interested to hear of similar experiences.
>
> Chris Keeler
>