Submitted by John Bergman-McCool
In July I enrolled in an online course, Policies for Managing Collections, through Museum Studies LLC. Their organization offers online museum study courses taught by experts in the field. They also offer a range of professional services to cultural institutions.
Over the four-week course, instructor John Simmons led our investigation of the purpose and function of collection management policies (CMPs). Simply stated, collections management includes everything that cultural institutions do to collect items, care for them, and make them available to the public. A CMP is a collection of policies that guide collection management activities and clarify who is responsible for making collections-related decisions.
In addition to myself, there were a handful of museum professionals from a diverse range of cultural institutions who were enrolled in the course. Each week we reviewed the different sections or policies typically included in a CMP. We were tasked with looking at the specific needs and critical issues facing our own institutions and we met remotely for discussions on the week’s readings.
Assignments were submitted to a forum and included writing sections of a CMP, critiquing a museum’s response to policy-related problems, and enumerating the policies required by our individual museums. Along with our instructor’s feedback, student responses regularly generated interesting discussions. In general, there were many opportunities to share knowledge with our peers and learn from each other’s experiences.
Some of the personal takeaways from the course included:
-A CMP should include a section on your institution’s legal organization or governing authority.
-No two CMPs are the same. Each CMP should be written with the specific structure, needs, and collection focus of the museum in mind. When writing a CMP, another institution’s policy can be informative, but it shouldn’t be copied.
-A CMP can be a stand-alone document, or it can be a collection of many separate policy documents.
-Policy is different from procedure. Policy provides the rules and guidelines for carrying out collection management duties. Procedures spell out how policy is followed on a day-to-day basis and should largely be excluded from policy documents. Exceptions to this rule include controversial collections management procedures such as deaccessioning. These procedures can be quite thorny and can be detailed in CMPs.
-CMPs are living documents. If a policy is not working, it can be reviewed and changed, but you’ll need a policy for reviewing and changing your policies.
The course was very informative and led me to think about our institution, its legal organization, and our collection in new ways.
The Peabody 