By John Simmons

This article was published in Museum News January/February 2004.

Things—the often unique, priceless, and irreplaceable objects in a collection—are typically what draw the public to a museum. But they are also what challenge the skills and sometimes disturb the sleep of museum staff and board members. The highly complex process of acquiring, financing, caring for, exhibiting, teaching about, and sometimes deaccessioning objects requires a good collections management policy. John Simmons offers some advice on crafting one.

It is clear that what distinguishes the museum from other educational, scientific, and aesthetic organizations is its relationship with its collections. “Museums exist,” writes Morris Museum Director Steven H. Miller, “because of an assumption that physical objects have value.” In Museums, Objects and Collections, Susan M. Pearce writes, “The point of collections and museums . . . revolves around the possession of ‘real things’ and . . . essentially this is what gives museums their unique role.”

Although there is a small percentage of museums that neither own nor use collections, it’s fair to say that most museums hold collections in trust for the public, which, in turn, holds their governing authorities accountable for:

1. maintaining the highest legal, ethical, and professional standards;
2. establishing policies that guide the institution's operation
3. and delegating specific responsibilities to staff, volunteers, and consultants through those policies.

The collections management policy is the institutional policy that governs everything a museum does to care for and grow its collections and make them available to the public. It encompasses acquisition, accession, registration, security, storage, use, and other collections-related activities, and also clarifies who is responsible for managing the collections. Through this document, the governing authority establishes the museum’s guidelines and professional standards for collections stewardship and gives the staff the authority to implement the policy. It is accompanied by collections management procedures—the detailed instructions that specify how the staff should apply the policy in their day-to-day activities.

The policy ensures that the museum fulfills its obligations to protect, manage, provide access to, and maintain intellectual control over its collections and their associated records. It is evidence that collections are acquired legally and ethically; are appropriate to and advance the museum’s mission; and are properly managed, housed, secured, conserved, documented, and used. “A collections management policy,” writes Marie C. Malaro in A Legal Primer for Managing Museum Collections, “. . . explains why a museum is in operation and how it goes about its business.”

An important note: A policy should be created only to accomplish a specific goal or address a particular issue and must be reviewed and revised on a regular basis. A policy is useless if it is outdated, ignored, too complex to be followed, too simplistic to be useful, or does not serve the museum’s mission. By enacting and enforcing good collections management policies, the museum’s governing authority meets its legal and ethical obligations to protect the collections and provide public access to them. Good policies help the museum achieve its mission and demonstrate its commitment to professional standards and practices.

Policy, Procedure, or Plan?

Although policies and procedures often are discussed together, it is important to understand the differences between them (see table 1).

Policies clearly establish the standards that regulate the museum’s activities. They identify what needs to be done and provide a framework to help staff make decisions. Policy statements must be approved by the governing authority.

Procedures tell the staff how to do things and provide the mechanism and details for implementing the policy. Procedures are a series of succinct and unambiguous action steps that are developed at the staff level. They do not have to be approved by the governing authority.

With increasing frequency, museums are creating a third type of document—called a collections plan—to shape the content of their collections. A plan outlines the “big vision” for the collections the museum plans to acquire as well as the steps it will take to reach that vision. It is the intellectual framework that explains why the museum is uniquely suited to collect certain objects and (based on the criteria in table 2) how it will add to or remove from the existing objects to achieve the ideal collection. Although collecting is central to the mission of museums (and significant resources are devoted to acquiring and caring for collections), collections planning in museums is rare. A good collections plan helps a museum remain true to its mission without amassing irrelevant material; without it, the museum’s collecting activities will lack control. (See “Collections Planning: Pinning Down a Strategy,” Museum News, July/August 2002.)

Traditionally, collections management policies have outlined the criteria that determine whether or not an object will be accessioned or deaccessioned. As such, there is a potential for overlap between the policy and the collections plan. Some museums direct readers of the policy to the plan for more information, and vice versa; others include the same information in both documents.

To determine how your policy and plan should address your collections needs, consider the nature of each type of document. A policy establishes general guidelines and principles that regulate the activities of the organization. It is not inherently time-limited, though it may change as the museum or the standards of the field evolve. A plan directs the ongoing process of deciding the museum’s specific activities. It specifies what will be accomplished in a given period, why, by whom, and with what resources.

Determining the Content

The collections management policy document should begin with the museum’s mission and a statement of purpose that reflects the museum’s legal status, bylaws, and capabilities. It then comprises a set of smaller, more detailed policies that focus on:

1. descriptions of the collections and the museum’s immediate collections-related goals
2. accessioning and deaccessioning criteria and methods
3. outgoing and incoming loans
4. management of non-accessioned objects in the museum’s custody
5. care of the collections; documentation and record-keeping systems; insurance and risk management; inventory of the collections
6. reproduction, copyright, and other legal and ethical issues related to the collections (e.g., NAGPRA)
7. access to the collections
8. review and revision of the policy

In addition, there are some fundamental commonalitiesamong all collections, whether they contain furniture, paintings, or fossils.(For example, all collections must be organized and protected from deterioration.) Thus, all collections management policies should incorporate these six basic principles:

1. Each acquisition entering the museum must be properly documented.
2. Collections must be stabilized for long-term preservation and housed in a proper storage environment.
3. Each individual collection element must be put in its specific place in the collection storage array.
4. The collections must be regularly inventoried and monitored.
5. The collections storage area must be regularly monitored. 
6. All activities related to and monitoring the collection must be documented.

Because collections management policies help the museum’s staff carry out their responsibilities, they also must:

• define the areas of staff responsibility
• delegate decision-making authority to the appropriate individuals or committees
• identify who has the authority to make exemptions to the policies (if necessary)
• direct the staff to maintain complete, written records regarding all collections-related decisions and activities.

Finally, collections management policies should address any issues that might have a substantial impact on the collections, museum operations, staff, or visitors (see table 3). They should reflect the best professional standards; be sensible, logical, and written in clear prose; and kept in a handbook that can be accessed easily. The goal is to provide the governing authority, staff, and public with the opportunity to learn about (and help enforce) the museum’s guidelines and standards for collections stewardship.

References

Campbell, N. J. 1998. Writing Effective Policies and Procedures: A Step-by-Step Resource for Clear Communication. American Management Association, New York.

Cato, P. S., and S. L. Williams. 1998. Guidelines for developing policies for the management and care of natural history collections. Collection Forum 9, no. 2: 84-107.

Gardner, J. B., and E. Merritt. 2002. Collections planning: pinning down a strategy. Museum News 81, no. 4: 30-33, 60-61.

———. 2004 Collections Planning. Washington, D.C.: American Association of Museums (forthcoming).

Malaro, M. C. 1994. Museum Governance. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. and London.

———. 1998. A Legal Primer on Managing Museum Collections. 2d ed. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C.

Miller, S. H. 1985. Selling items from museum collections. The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship 4: 289-294

Museum Services Act 20 USC § 968(4).

Nicks, J. 1999. Collections management in The Manual of Museum Planning, 2d ed., G. D. and B. Lord, eds. AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, Calif.

Pearce, S. M. 1993. Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C.

Shelton, S. Y. 2001. External mandate and internal management: developing collections policies in public trust museums. Unpublished lecture presented at the University of Delaware Museum Studies Program.

Simmons, J. E. and Y. Muñoz-Saba. 2003. The theoretical bases of collections management. Collection Forum 18 (1-2):1-37.

John Simmons is a collections manager and coordinator of the museum studies program, Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center, University of Kansas, Lawrence. This article is adapted from his forthcoming (2004) AAM book, which will review the specific functions covered by a collections management policy.