Donations To A Museum Are Lost To Philately Forever.

A Master Collector ended a recent lecture/presentation with a few principles of collecting.

One, oft-mentioned, is that condition never gets better, so always buy the best. (And he practiced as he preached!)

Another, less common, is to never donate anything to a museum as it will be lost to philately forever.

Putting the far future aside for a moment, let's look at this in terms of the last few decades:

In the past, most items in private hands would come-up for sale in every generation (if not more often), which meant that motivated collectors could acquire that material for their own collections & exhibits.

These sales, necessarily, generated an ocean of auction catalogs - easily available to any collector at nominal cost - with descriptions and, over time, more & better illustrations of all that museum-worthy material.

Lastly, the exhibits 'circuit' meant that the vast majority of collectors would - from time to time, at minimum expense for travel - be able to see, up close, the level of material that makes it into competitive exhibits.

Contrast that with museums, philatelic & otherwise:

Q/ What fraction of their holdings have ever seen the light of day?

Q/ What fraction of collectors can travel to that museum at that magic moment?

In general, scholars & journalists, travelling on someone else's dime, are better-off when there are large, centralized repositories of whatever they need to take a look at.

But is the hobby?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey (who is mindful of the coming deluge of comments about archival storage conditions, but who thinks that the hobby is in more danger than it's stamps)

Excellent post, and timely questions. Don't know the answers, but I can think of one possible exception (which only confirms your observation). Some institutions receiving donations of quality philatelic material at some point put that material back into the market to generate cash. This has caused some friction with collection donors and their heirs, who mistakenly thought their donated stamp collections would constitute a small, eternal monument to the donor. Point is, some donated material does find its way back into circulation. Don't know how much, obviously, but I suspect it is not a large part of the material going into museum or library vaults.

'
The words you want to google are { museum de-accessioning }

... and, yes, it can cause quite an uproar.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

A friend of mine, who has done extensive research at the Smithsonian and National Postal Museum, among other places, relayed to me that it's an absolute waste to donate anything to the NPM because it will just go into a warehouse where it will remain forever.

There are (at least when Don was there a decade or so ago) seven large warehouses with philatelic donations still in the crates they were received in.

Can you image how much philatelic material - GOOD material at that - is now locked away from collectors? The problem is that the staff of the NPM doesn't have the manpower to even begin to tackle this Aegean Stable which is their donations received.

Besides, from a museum standpoint, how many Scott #1 and #2 can they possibly use?

Deaccessioning these donations is never going to happen because once you give something to the government, they don't give it back.

So yes, do NOT donate to a museum or anywhere, including APS, where the stamps will remain off the market forever.

Augean stables is really apt. One has to wonder how many modern US addressed FDC collections (with albums) from Reader's Digest and the like were donated and are in those warehouses.

I still prefer Stampman's Aegean stables, but it's all Greek to me.

A few years ago I had a fairly unproductive e-mail exchange with the British Museum about its failure to do anything with the Wharton Tigar collection of cigarette cards - the world's finest - which had been bequeathed to it. I thought it frustrating that the BM hadn't got a significant amount of the material into public view via the web. It was clear that the BM had little or no intention of doing so, and would not in any case do so without developing voluminous accompanying information (printers, designers etc). You can gain access to the material - I believe visiting Yanks look at rare baseball cards from time to time - but it would be possible to do so much more with it. On the other hand, I don't think the BM takes any old tosh donated to it by collectors ...

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Digitizing the archives would go a long way towards making museum piles accessible, and they are welcome to argue for continued contributions on the grounds that anything digitized at a MajorMuseumDotCom is inherently more accessible than the same material digitized at PlayleDotCom or DenmanDotCom.

I have seen some minimalist museum digitalizations, with barely a title added to an item number and locator code ... what would greatly extend their interpretative/educational reach would be crowdsourced notations.

Come to think of it, if memory serves there is a New York City digital collection (maps? photographs?) that encourages users to add what they know, especially identifying details.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

IkeyPikey:

The Library of Congress has a volunteer crowd-sourcing project to transcribe some of their manuscript digitized materials.

All:
Most museums and libraries/archives will not accept donations with any restrictions, etc., regarding its use They reserve the right to integrate anything received that they need into their collections, and dispose of the balance to pay for acquisitions of materials that they do need to complete a collection.

Any donation of material to a museum or research library/archive should be accompanied by a financial donation targeted to the development of a finding aid for the donated materials.

It could probably be cleverly phrased that the Finding Aid should have to be completed and placed on-line within a certain time frame, or the donation would revert to the donor. I would also assume that a donation to fund the digitization and on-line presentation would be accepted as well.

Much of the above does not apply with regard to donations of personal papers,traditional historical arts). The APRL has the personal philatelic archives of both Dale Pulver and George Brett, together with substantially detailed Finding Aids. I am sure they have other such collections also.

To paint with a less-broad brush, many museums are getting better these days. They do not accept all donations, they have better policies stating that accepted items may not be kept - indeed they will likely be sold to further their missions.

Some of the blame should also go on the donors, who have expectation on the museums that their donation will be instantly processed and available for display or research, yet they have failed as a donor to make the accompanying cash donation to pay someone to process and catalog the donation. Donations without accompanying cash are frequently burdens to museums. Naturally it will sit idle until the money and priorities become higher.

That said, I lean heavily toward NOT donating items to museums. Most have more items than their current resources can manage. And few have staff members with philatelic knowledge to properly catalog and manage the donations.

LOL, I see mml was typing much the same as I at the same time!

At FLOORTRADER STAMP AUCTIONS some of our best purchases have been from night janitors who work at the best museums .

Dispersed throughout the collector world is much better and safer and more preserved and accessible than all in one place overall. Fire, flood, improper storage, theft inside and out the backdoor.

Plus, collectors can sign the back of rare stamps to stake their ownership like dogs marking trees.
Don

FLOORTRADER: I hope that you recent comments about "Night Janitors" was in jest. If not, I think it says al ot about your ethics as well as the night janitors.

Redwood Randy- Boy you said a mouthful... I spent some time speaking with an archaeologist from the National Museum in Brazil that burned.... It is devastating for the whole culture... Everything just Gone!

My specialized Paleoindian archaeology library has taken a lifetime to build and I really want to see it scattered to the four winds when I'm gone... So others can have the experience of finding those rare treasures too- so much better reading association copies with the marginalia than pdfs alone.... my 2c

Pretty sure most stamp donations to museums these days, unless they are specifically a philatelic museum or have a curator knowledgeable about philately (unlikely), just get sold to purchase other things.

In general, I share the sentiment of keeping material in the collector domain, out of museums, for reasons stated. There may be some exceptional cases that make sense to put a particular item or items in a museum, but for the most part, no.

I should point out, that back in 1995, when the NPM decided it needed some Hawaiian Missionaries for its collection, the curator at the time, went to the Honolulu Advertiser Hawaii sale, and bought some. There was the joke after that sale, of 'did people really know who they were bidding against?'.