This section contains a series of hypothetical situations, most based on the real-life experiences of various registrars and collections managers. For many of these scenarios, there are no right or wrong answers; they are designed to stimulate critical thinking in students and to challenge museum professionals to draw on their own experience and training to find creative answers to the dilemmas presented. Keep in mind that institutions and situations differ so what is the best answer at one time and place may not be at another.
It is a quiet Monday morning and as you sit down at your desk with a cup coffee prepared to tackle a pile of paperwork, one of the docents arrives at your door with a box containing an object that was left at the front desk over the weekend. The docent has no idea who was working at the desk when the object was dropped off or what is supposed to happen to it, but she thinks it is supposed to be a donation.
As the registrar, one of your duties is to carefully examine the legality of objects being considered for the collection. During one of your investigations, you find that an object’s presence in the United States is questionable, and believe that this information must be made transparent to those who make decisions about acquisitions. However, the curator acquiring the piece is your direct supervisor and thinks you are just being nitpicky. The curator really wants the object for the collection and insists that no other registrar would be as obstinate as you.
While a major permanent gallery is being refurbished, two large collection objects on exhibit in the space have been carefully wrapped and sealed for protection because it would be difficult to move them. However, things are not going well—the operations department chief just called to say that there would be major delays in the refurbishing project because of staff shortages. Then you get a call from the education department that they really need an early opening of the gallery so that a class can use it; they have a long-standing and important relationship with the local university where the class is taught and had already promised them use of the space the day it was supposed to open. You have just hung up when the special events coordinator drops by to say that she forgot to tell you that they have already scheduled a wedding for this space immediately after the originally projected opening date.
One day, as you are busily working away as a collections manager in a large natural history museum, one of the curators brings you a collection of specimens that he recently brought back from his fieldwork in the tropics. You ask the curator for copies of the collecting permits and export and import documents, but he tells you that they are not needed because the collection is on long-term loan from a tourist lodge in the country where he was working. This sounds suspicious, so you ask for a copy of the loan documents and instead the curator angrily demands that you just do your job and accession and catalog the specimens immediately.
After much consideration and staff discussion, the museum’s administration has decided not to allow public photography in the galleries. This measure has been taken for reasons of safety, copyright, and security. During the first week that the new policy is in effect, you receive the following five queries. How should you respond to each?
In the course of a complete inventory of the collection, you discover a number of recently emptied beer cans in a back corner of the collection storage area, where food and drink are prohibited. You do not know if it is the guards, the interns, or perhaps the curator who has been drinking on the job.
A member of the museum’s governing board, a prominent local physician, asks to borrow a painting that he presented to the museum several years ago as a gift so he can display it in his office.
The educator calls you to come up to a gallery where an exhibit of paintings on loan from another institution is on display. When you arrive, the educator points to one of the paintings and says that she does not remember that one being there yesterday. You look and realize you do not recognize the painting, either.
The museum has just deaccessioned and sold more than a hundred low-value objects that have been taking up space and resources in museum storage for decades.
A young new curator, who is sensitive to the ethics of collecting, has found an object at auction that she would like for the museum to purchase. However, the object may have been purchased and imported after 1970. She comes to you, the registrar, for advice about the ethics of purchasing the work and to determine your requirements for complete provenance.
The special events coordinator has scheduled a very important (her description) Chamber of Commerce reception for the main entrance and front lawn of the museum. The date of the major event is imminent, but the weather forecast looks grim so the coordinator wants to move the event indoors and set up two bars (serving a local red wine) in a multipurpose area where only a few art objects are installed.
A loan request comes from a small historic house museum for an elegant wooden chest that is important for their upcoming 150th anniversary exhibit. However, being an historic house, the building is essentially without environmental controls.
A local conservator asks the museum if she could have some deaccessioned, low-value objects for her students to use as practice pieces.
The beloved old curator of history is now himself history. Returning from the memorial service, you enter his office to remove the object files and other museum documents before his family arrives to claim his personal possessions. To your surprise, you cannot find any of the museum documents of files that you are sure he had in his office.
The public relations director and special events manager in the historic house museum where you were lucky to get a job as collections manager have planned an exciting, crowd-pleasing activity for Halloween. In a staff meeting, they enthusiastically explain that all they want to do is exaggerate the long-standing rumors that the historic house is haunted by its previous inhabitants, open the museum late one night, and invite a local ghost hunter who uses “scientific” equipment to come in and detect paranormal activity. Meanwhile, the docents can tell people about the history of the house and the family. And it probably was not a murder anyway.
The Curator of Contemporary Art wants to acquire a sculpture made of plastic that the conservator assures you will degrade and as it does so, off-gas acidic vapors. Furthermore, the conservator says that it is not possible to preserve the artwork and that the off-gassing of the deteriorating plastic will pose a risk to other objects in the collection. The curator, however, insists that this artwork will be an important addition to the collection.
You have arrived for your first day at an anthropology museum. Settling into your new responsibilities, you find a metal cabinet in the holding area for collections containing various objects, some with handwritten notes under them, some with no notes at all. The first one you look at says, “Possibly a gift, 1982.” The next one says, “M. Campbell identification request, 12/91.” And the list goes on.
Everything is in place for an important exhibition. The couriers for several loans have come and gone and are in agreement with placement, security, and installation. Then you receive three unanticipated requests: special events needs a bar in the entrance gallery for a major donor reception, education has come up with an innovative activity and requests that it be conducted in the exhibition space (participants will use blunt scissors and colored pencils), and adult programs calls to say that they are getting so many group requests for tours that they need to raise the number of people allowed in the gallery at one time.
You are called to the director’s office where you are introduced to a very nice elderly woman, who explains that the family wants to donate to the museum a collection of artifacts that a cousin brought back from Turkey in the 1940s. That is, most of the family thinks this is a good idea.
A group of rowdy, out-of-control kids running around one of the galleries knocks over a pedestal on which a sculpture, now in pieces, was mounted. Unfortunately, the sculpture was on loan from another museum.
’Twas the night before Christmas (December 24) and a major donor called, offering the museum a substantial year-end gift. However, the curator is out of the country until after the new year. The director worries about offending the donor.
In a seemingly brilliant move to save paper and increase efficiency, the museum administration announces that henceforth, all museum documents must be born digital and must remain digital.
An important long-term donor to your museum wants you to backdate a deed-of-gift for an object he is about to donate so that he can use the donation to take a tax benefit even though the deadline has passed. Your director thinks this would be okay because who would know.
Your museum has acquired a piece by a living artist, who has supplied specific installation instructions. Unfortunately, these instructions will not provide adequate support and protection for the piece in the gallery.
Your museum is hosting an exhibition of born-digital art. You receive on loan many DVDs with digital artwork. The insurance values differ widely: some lenders place a value on the intellectual artwork, whereas others require insurance only for the physical disc.
You discover that a development staff member has accepted a donation of objects for your museum without asking. Unfortunately, it is stuff you do not want, but comes with a large donation.
A trustee has for many years kept objects on deposit at your museum because he simply does not have room to store them at home. The problem is your storage space is limited as well. This trustee has been generous to the museum so the administration is concerned about offending him.
During a recent inventory, you found nearly one hundred objects whose cards have been marked “deaccessioned,” but the objects are clearly still present in the museum. There are no records of deaccession in the object files, and you have no idea when the deaccessioning might have been done.
Define “found in collection” (FIC) for your museum and write a clear policy to place FIC in context. Develop as well a process to incorporate FIC intelligently into the permanent collections.
You carefully discuss all of the requirements for a large African mask that you’re lending to another institution: Its crate is oversized and will need a very large door and elevator, it needs to be mounted on a pedestal with an acrylic vitrine, and the shipping estimate does not include off-site stops or offsite storage of the crate. Agreements are made. The week before you ship the mask, you receive a note from the borrower asking that you eliminate the vitrine requirement. Then, when the courier arrives with the work, it is discovered that the crate will not fit through the door, and there is no elevator.
You return from lunch to find a box on your desk that just arrived from another museum, probably containing some objects that were to be sent to your museum on loan. You think you see something moving—sure enough, and when you peer closer, you see that it is an evil-looking insect, crawling out of the box.
How do you track in-house exhibitions?
We rely increasingly on computers to store and manage information for us.
Past inconsistencies in your museum’s filing procedures have left you with some documents filed by object number and some by the donor’s or vendor’s name. Some documents are duplicated and filed in both source and object files. Some donor files contain documentation relating to multiple gifts and are consequently thick and disorganized. Some object files, on the other hand, are practically empty. Devise a plan to sort out your filing system and to bring some order to this chaos.
You have accumulated a large number of digital photographs taken as records of conservation work.
A donor promises that he will give a large part of his extensive collection to your museum but insists that the museum must send a registrar to his house to do an inventory of his entire collection and then he will decide which objects to donate and which to sell.
Your museum receives as a gift a purse containing matching accessories: a wallet and comb. The purse is also inside of its original felt storage bag. The curator wants to accession the storage bag as well as the purse and its contents.
An exhibit is about to close at your museum. You have limited gallery space, so you plan to pack loans for return shipment in your storage area. Your conservator, however, wants to complete outgoing condition checks in the gallery—she can see the objects better while they are still on the wall or on their pedestals.
You have been asked to oversee the numbering and marking of an acquisition of three thousand objects from an historic home that was recently acquired by your museum.
The new curator (fresh out of curator school) informs you that the old environmental standards are now out of date, and thus, it is okay to put any object anywhere because he remembers reading somewhere that the Smithsonian said that was okay.
You are asked to keep an exhibition of hand-colored prints up for a six-month period instead of the originally scheduled three months. Then the most prestigious museum in the region asks you to loan the exhibition of prints to them for an extra three months.
Your museum’s storage areas are below grade, overcrowded, filled with objects in cardboard boxes, and equipped with wooden shelves holding the cardboard boxes, and there is no consistent location identification scheme.
A very large sculpture is arriving at your museum. The piece is not heavy and does not require rigging, but it is so big it cannot fit through the loading dock elevator; it must be carried up the steps of the museum and through the front door. The weather is cold and icy.
Decide whether to send a courier with:
The museum hires a well-established and respected art service company to pack and ship a fragile group of ceramics from a lender’s home to the museum for exhibition. They are also contracted to help install the works in the exhibit. Everything is overseen by the museum’s registrar. A vase is broken in the home of the lender and a ceramic sculpture turns up with hairline cracks at the time of deinstallation.
You are looking for new off-site storage space. You visit different sites to check their security, climate control, etc.
A river that runs close to your museum has risen to record-breaking heights, and experts predict that it will continue to rise and flood in a matter of days. The water is seeping through walls as well as through the backup floor drains, so your precaution of keeping things off the floor has not saved the day. When you get a call from your security force, water is approximately an inch deep, and shelves containing rare books and print boxes are involved as well.
Your insurance broker has advised you that your insurance premiums might be lower if your disaster plan had a more thoroughly detailed section on fire prevention.
You work at a historic house museum located in a downtown urban area. You have just learned that an office building next to your museum is planning a major renovation.
You have been fighting a constant battle with the administration about renting space in the museum. Now you are informed that a five-hundred-person dinner party is being given in the most value-intensive galleries at the museum. You protest but are told that the money is absolutely necessary. You walk through on the day of the event and find a microphone dangling over a statue. People are placing tables close to other sculpture. After the event you find a butter knife under one of the bases and splash marks where the cleaning table has been set up.
A museum commissioned a local artist to paint a panel for an upcoming exhibition. There was, however, no written contract. The curator decides to do a publication that will include not only the finished panel but also photographs of the artist working on it. She wants an accession number and a credit line.
A photo containing a 1910 portrait by G. P. A. Healy, owned by the Sample Museum, has appeared in a New York Times ad for the ABC Investment firm. The ad shows the painting sitting on an easel in a sidewalk setting with a caption beside it. After some research the museum finds that a reproduction of the photograph was used on the set and that no permission had been sought.
A request has been made to publish images of the following. What do you think is the likely copyright status of each?
A donor wants to divide a gift into two parts—each part contains several objects—so that he may take a deduction in the present tax year (2019) and the next tax year (2020). He decides this after you have received the collection at the museum. He also says he wants to deal with the paperwork only once, so he asks that all of the paperwork be forwarded to him. Given that you have the intent and the delivery, which of the following do you do?
A museum takes in a donation for an educational collection and intends to hold and use it for at least three years. After six months of use, the objects in the collection have all been destroyed.
You receive an appraisal from a donor when he sends an 8283 form to be completed by the museum, and you note that the value of the object is far too high when compared to like objects you are aware of.
During an inventory of your museum’s holdings the collections manager finds several slivers of bone stored with some lithics.
Your curator of Native American Arts wishes to acquire a headdress that contains feathers of an endangered species (not eagle). The feathers were legally obtained by the current owner. How do the following situations affect the acquisition’s process and legality?
A collector in Europe wishes to donate some pieces of scrimshaw to your museum.