Museum of Health Care Blog

If you’re into museums and you’re into movies, you probably have a special place in your heart for Toy Story 2. After all, what greater summary of museum work could there be than Kelsey Grammar’s line, “You can go back, or you can stay with us and last forever. You’ll be adored by children for generations.”

To be in a museum is to be cherished for all time, after all. Or is it?

First of all, if Woody the cowboy goes to the museum, he’s probably spending a lot of time in storage; like icebergs, museums have a lot going on under the surface and only a fraction of our collection ever makes it on exhibit. Some items will only ever be useful for research and even with social media giving us another tool to showcase our collection, there are probably things that will never see the light of day.

But secondly, to be a museum piece doesn’t necessarily mean to be preserved forever. Museums do sometimes go through their collections and get rid of certain items, in a process called deaccessioning. Let’s talk a little bit about how that works.

To talk about deaccessioning, we first have to talk about accessioning. So, what does the word “accession” mean? Put simply, it’s the process of making an item part of a museum’s permanent collection. That involves physically placing the item in the museum, of course, but it also involves a lot of paperwork and legality. The museum has to make sure it has clear legal title to the item, usually in the form of having a donor sign a gift agreement, and has to catalogue the item into its system with its own special tracking number (called an accession number). If you’re ever seen an item on exhibit with a small number peeking out from the underside, what you’ve probably spotted is its accession number.

Accessioning is how a museum says, “This item is special and this item belongs to us.” It also confers certain responsibilities on the museum.

If someone gives me a book, it’s my book from that point forward. I can put it on a shelf, chuck it in a box at the back of my closet, throw it off the roof, sell it on Kijiji. I don’t have to track it or take care of it to any particular standards.

But things are different for items that have been accessioned. An accessioned item has to be cared for to the highest possible standards. It needs to be in a stable environment, it needs to be carefully stored in a secure place, and we always need to know where it is. And when we want to get rid of it, we can’t just toss it in the dumpster out back. Instead, we need to reverse the accessioning process through deaccessioning.

Deaccessioning is the formal removal of an item from a museum’s permanent collection. The important thing to know about deaccessioning is that it’s mostly about paperwork and about status. An item can be deaccessioned without moving from its spot on a shelf. Physical removal of the item is a different and related process, called disposal (disposal in this case doesn’t translate to “garbage,” it just means putting the object somewhere else). We can deaccession items and not dispose of them, but a museum should never dispose of an item without deaccessioning it.

It’s important to note that not every item in a museum is part of the collection. Things like props, furniture, and office supplies don’t get accession numbers. I don’t need to deaccession my pen when it runs dry, I can just toss it in the trash.

So why do museums deaccession their items?

There are a lot of reasons, but it can basically be boiled down to one: resources aren’t infinite. No museum has unlimited storage space, infinite personnel, or infinite money. Every item in the collection requires at least a little space, requires staff time to catalogue, track, and care for it, and may require money in the form of conservation or other supportive supplies. Every item in a museum collection has a cost and, therefore, has to “earn its keep,” as the saying goes. Regularly assessing the collection and deaccessioning items that don’t fit or are taking up too many resources is an important part of making sure that the collection is well looked after and that the museum is able to effectively tell its story.

Deaccessioning decisions are not made alone. Every museum has a process involving multiple people. At the Museum of Health Care at Kingston, I make the decisions about what to deaccession, but it’s not a solitary choice. I’ll get advice from other members of staff, chiefly the collections manager, Kathy Karkut (who I’ll freely admit knows the collection far better than I do!). Once I’ve made my final decision, it doesn’t stop there. I’ll present the items and rationale to our Programming and Collections Committee. Once I get the nod from them, it becomes a Board decision on whether or not an item should be deaccessioned. Having many eyes on the deaccession list ensures that the museum makes smart, objective, defensible decisions about deaccessioning.

Once an item has been deaccessioned, we turn to disposal. In almost every case, this doesn’t mean it goes in the garbage. Museums want to keep their objects in the public trust. In fact, when the Museum of Health Care is deciding where a deaccessioned object is best suited to go, sometimes it won’t even leave the building. We have often placed deaccessioned items into our own Education Collection. An Education Collection is a collection of objects used, as the name suggests, for education. The rules are more lax for these objects; they are not stored as securely or carefully and many of them can be touched by members of the public. If an item is in good shape and is safe for handling, it may make its way into the Education Collection.

 There’s nothing wrong with it, we just have a bunch of the same model in the permanent collection, so it was a great candidate to go somewhere it could serve as a teaching tool.

If an object isn’t suitable for the Education collection, our first step will be to offer it around to other museums; sometimes at the Museum of Health Care, we won’t even go through the deaccessioning process unless we know the item already has a home to go to.

Deaccessioning is often for the object’s benefit, too. It’s not uncommon at all for a museum to decide that an object is a better fit for someone else’s collection. Once in a blue moon, museums might compete against each other but we’re mostly pretty cooperative. It can, however, be hard to determine where an object is most thematically suitable. Does an innovative new machine for blood transfusion belong to the history of medicine or the history of science and technology?

There are lots of ways we decide. First of all, we might compare our respective collections. If we have twelve World War I Nursing Sister uniforms and a military museum has zero, it makes sense to deaccession one to give to them. We get a little more space, the military museum gets something new to display, and the uniform goes somewhere more people will see it, increasing access to this part of Canada’s heritage.

We also might decide based on our respective skills. One of our primary goals is to make sure the objects are in the best possible hands. Maybe that apothecary’s record book is more relevant to our museum, but the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library has a book conservator on site so we might hand it over to them anyway. An object that might have started to rot after five years in our collection without a specialist’s attention is now going to last for decades.

If we can’t find a home for an object at a museum or another public institution, we might turn to selling it. This isn’t ideal, but it can be necessary if the object simply doesn’t fit in a museum collection anywhere. The best method of sale is usually public auction, but sometimes museums work with reputable private dealers. Museums typically try to be as transparent about these things as possible and an arms’ length seller helps with propriety. 

The goal for any museum object sale shouldn’t be to make money. The money is secondary and most museums have pretty strict rules about what we can spend it on. For a lot of museums, the Museum of Health Care included, money from the collection goes to the collection. We could spend it on conservation supplies or shelving or even new objects, but we can’t spend it on our endowment fund or an exhibit or throwing a really cool party. That helps to ensure that we’re making measured decisions about whether or not an object should be sold.

This is important because museums have to consider their reputations when selling items. Typically that doesn’t come up for us; when we’ve sold something, it’s because it’s not unique or special enough for our collection or anyone else’s so no one is very bothered. But other museums have been sanctioned and even lost their accreditation for selling collection pieces they shouldn’t have, typically big ticket items they explicitly sold because they wanted funding. Yikes!

So if money isn’t the motivator, why sell your objects? Well, first of all, we don’t sell for money but the money is nice. Sometimes an object is not so valuable to a museum – we’ve got twelve of this exact model of sputum flask and so does every other institution we’ve contacted – but it can mean a lot to a private collector. The museum frees up some shelf space and tosses a few bucks into the collections maintenance fund and a citizen gets a neat object. Everybody wins!

That covers most of the objects that are deaccessioned. But not every object goes to a new home. It’s true that disposal doesn’t mean garbage, but it does sometimes mean destruction.

Typically, destruction of an object is treated as a last resort and there are rules around that, too; most museums (yep, us, too) require at least two people to witness the destruction. There are occasions when we deaccession an object in order to destroy it, but that’s always because of safety concerns. If an item has deteriorated badly or been damaged somehow, it might be judged a danger to people, to the objects around it, or to the environment as a whole. We might also make a nasty discovery; for instance, that an item previously considered safe is dangerously radioactive. In that case, we’re not going to keep it in our collection. We’re deaccessioning and getting rid of it as fast as possible according to the relevant rules and regulations.

This is also a semi-exception to the deaccession before disposal rule; if we break an old thermometer, we don’t have to go through the deaccession process before we can call hazardous waste disposal to clean up the mercury. We do still have to properly deaccession it retroactively, though. Rules are rules.

And that, perhaps, is the main takeaway. A museum may not be forever, but decisions about what stays and what goes are not arbitrary. They’re long and complicated and very well thought out. And when museums refine their collections, it’s a net benefit for everyone. Objects may end up somewhere they’re more appreciated, the museum is able to provide better care to everything remaining in the collection, and the public sees better exhibits and has better access to artifacts and research.

But I guess “You can go back, or you can stay with us and last until the museum decides you’re better suited elsewhere and goes through a complicated procedure while maintaining the highest possible ethics” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it in a children’s movie.