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National Collections Program
Developing a Collections Management Policy
Collections Management Policies: Fiduciary Responsibility
Regardless of how a museum is organized, the governing body (museum board, trustees) serves as fiduciaries of a public trust. They are obligated to hold the institution's assets, especially collections, in trust for the general public.
Museum boards have duties of care, loyalty, and obedience in the exercise of their responsibilities.
- Duty of care: requires museum boards to carry out their responsibilities in "good faith" - to establish and monitor a prudent collections management policy and to exercise responsible oversight.
- Duty of loyalty: requires museum boards to place the interests of the museum above personal interests in financial and other matters. Policy and procedures for addressing conflicts of interest is an integral part of a museum's overall collections management system.
- Duty of obedience: requires museum boards to remain true to the specific mission of the museum. When establishing a collections management policy, the museum must stay within the boundaries drawn by its mission or charter.
A collections management policy provides a mechanism that assures decisions concerning collections are prudent, responsible, informed, and in accordance with the museum's mission. A policy ensures collections are responsibly developed, maintained, exhibited, used, and preserved.
Beginning in the 1970's, a series of incidents involving museum collections management policies (or more accurately, the lack of clear policies) attracted substantial and occasionally sensational press coverage.
For example:
- In 1971, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, faced a well-deserved public scandal when a purported Raphael portrait was seized by United States Customs Officers from the museum and returned to Italy. Although it appeared that the work had indeed been illegally exported from Italy, it was confiscated for a violation of United States - not Italian - law: the curator had not declared the work on its importation to this country.
- The sale of works from museum collections hit the pages of the New York Times in 1972, bringing the term "deaccession" into front-page prominence and the Metropolitan Museum into a brilliant and unaccustomed spotlight. The particular incident involved paintings bequeathed to the museum and subsequently sold by the museum in a series of private sales despite the donor's expressed wishes that the Metropolitan distribute to other museums the works it did not wish to keep. Following an investigation by the attorney general of the state of New York, the Metropolitan Museum made public an internal report on the deaccessioning of works from the collections.
- In 1975, the attorney general of New York sued the trustees of the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation for a series of actions and inactions that directly affected collections care, including the failure to maintain a full inventory of the collections and self-dealing transactions in which trustees were alleged to have obtained works from the museum for themselves and that donations to the museum from trustees were valued at inflated figures for tax purposes. Shortly after the board of trustees was reconstituted and a new director was hired, the museum published a comprehensive collections management policy.
- In 1976, the attorney general of Illinois brought a suit against the trustees of Chicago's Harding Museum charging, among other things, that the storage conditions of the collections was inadequate and potentially damaging. The aspect of the case directly involving museum collections was settled in 1982 when a significant portion of the Harding Museum's holdings were transferred to the Chicago Art Institute.
- In the early 1990's, the New York Historical Society was on the verge of bankruptcy after decades of poor management. Following the involvement of the New York Attorney General and heated media and professional scrutiny, the Society refocused its mission, pared its collections, and put up for auction some $20 million worth of objects.
1. Stephen K. Urice, Collections Management Policies and a Museum Trustee's Duties. ALI-ABA: Legal Problems of Museum Administration, 1997.Copy goes here.
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