Who Decides What Stays in the Museum Collection?
D E ACCESSIO By Sandra Hudson Communications Consultant
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The walrus (Odobenus rosmarus) lives in Arctic waters— well outside the museum’s regional mandate. This specimen will go to the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC.
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ith more than seven million items in the Royal BC Museum collections and 27 linear kilometres of records in the BC Archives, the collections are both an enviable historical resource and a massive undertaking to properly steward. One vital element of managing the museum and archives collections is deaccessioning: the formal process of removing an object, material or specimen from the collections. Managing the collections is a dynamic process, as the composition of museum collections is ever changing. Deaccessioning is an ongoing process, but it is never done hastily or without robust conversation. The process is strictly guided by museum policy, as well as the guidance of Royal BC Museum curators, archivists and collections managers, who have immense knowledge of the collection. In managing the collections, one of the major concerns is whether materials have provincial significance or help further our understanding of BC’s human or natural history. If they don’t, they are considered for deaccession. (It’s important to note that the repatriation of Indigenous cultural belongings, ancestral remains and burial belongings in the museum’s care is a separate, unrelated process. The disposal of government records in the BC Archives is also a separate process, governed by BC’s Information Management Act.)
