You really never know when it comes to any organization.

If things are good now, a new President or Manager could decide it's time to "clean house" and have inexperienced staff decide what is valuable or not.

On the contrary, an organization that doesn't have any dedicated archives or preservation system may put your items in safe storage and then in the future an excellent preservation team cares for it and displays it very well for decades.

Just to play Devil's Advocate here:

Is there any assurance that the Akron RR Club would have managed to handle that photo collection any better? Does the Club have an Archives, partner with a public or academic library, a museum, or what?

Not casting aspersions on an "innocent" group, but who's to say things would have turned out any differently than the Morning Sun collection?

At the time of Dave's death, he had just finished 14 years as club president, so there was a high commitment to his legacy. We did get a chunk of his "seconds and dupes" that are still kept by one of his friends and have been shown (but we can't publish them). The club was part of an effort to establish a regional railroad image archive through Cleveland State University, and that was ongoing for over 10 years, but there was that dreaded "change in leadership" at CSU and they decided it was not something they wanted to continue, so we have all of our related materials back from that, in the possession of the club secretary and are pursuing alternative places to deposit it. When the Akron, Canton and Youngstown RR HS disbanded as a conventional SIG, they donated their archive to the University of Akron's Special Collections unit, and we have some hope of our material going there, or the county historical society, or Akron-Summit Public Library, which also has a special collections department (I have hope of some of my collection going to one of those places as well). So, if you have members who are committed to finding a place to donate "stuff" to, it's possible to save things. Never any guarantees of course.

The world has solved this problem: it's called accreditations.

But many folks shun them because "it takes the fun out of it" or it makes them do things like professionals instead of folks just wanting to play trains.

It's why things like this might seem like marketing, but aren't really: https://affiliations.si.edu/applying-for-affiliation/

Pro's and con's - Steamtown is fully accredited and I wouldn't call them a shining example :)

This is, philosophically, far too complex a discussion to summarize in glib online comments.

The entire world of academia, libraries, and museums is changing before our eyes in the 21st century, at times in ways that "we" would have found unfathomable just a decade or two earlier.

This year a local university library, in a stunning change of how "libraries" work, purged itself of a full 85% of its books. It did so strategically, offering tomes to other libraries and museum archives first before turning the shelves open to the public. Instead, the library is being transformed into an "education and research center"--heavily dependent, of course, upon the Internet and computers. And a good look at the shelves there told us why hundreds or thousands of the books went to recycling--I pulled, as "examples of shame," books on how to use your 1999-vintage cell phone camera, how to use your 2002-vintage "smart phone," a directory of used/rare book dealers from 1986 (I found one still in business!), 1970s books on avian biology now rendered out of date, now-obsolete highway safety manuals, and more.

Today's young people are NOT learning from books. (Prove me wrong.)

I'm closely watching the collections of the libraries of the Md. Rail Heritage Library, the RR Museum of Pa., and the Arizona Railway Museum. I'm down to the point where I can only pledge to any of them the absolute rarest books I own, a mere half-dozen or so. The rest either duplicate their holdings or won't fit their missions (an Arizona rail library has no good use for books on Welsh narrow gauge or South African or Soviet steam technology development). I can say all I want that it would be wise for them to have my books on Beyer Peacock and Beyer-Garratts, or the Transportation Act of 1958, but the academics into that stuff are only going to show up at Barriger-Mercantile, not Baltimore or Strasburg or Chandler. (Prove me wrong.)

Having spent the better part of the last 20 years in the preservation of industrial collections, mainly archival, rather than full size, I'd like to offer some thoughts.
1. Learning about an organization, its mission, and its board are critical steps. It would do me no good to leave a priceless collection of anthracite railroad material to a group in Vancouver. They shouldn't take it (assuming their mission is to preserve Canadian railroad history) and should try and suggest some alternatives that might be better to the potential donor.
2. People move on. Professionals personnel in charge of this material are not necessarily as passionate about it as the members of this forum are. That doesn't mean they won't do a good job caring for it as they are professionals, trained in collections care.
3. Collections should be reassessed periodically to make sure they are still worthwhile. I have brought in material that was later determined to either be off mission or not significant. It is how that material is dealt with that makes a difference and shows whether an organization is a good steward. I may have been the best home at the time, but am I still? I have gotten collections from other organizations that felt my employer was a better home and I have passed things on to other homes that I have felt ware better.
4. Archives are expensive. Proper climate controls and storage enclosures are not cheap. A single box for storing 4-500 slides is $25. Then throw on top the electric bill of keeping the collections spaces at 60 degrees or lower for certain types of materials. How many private collectors keep things in plastic that off gasses in high temperature environments that will speed an item's deterioration. As movies and still photos on acetate bases degrade, can a private collector deal with the degradation? Try and leave money to support the care of your priceless collections so that they can be better cared for.
5. How many are equipped to handle large volumes of material? Most archivists are used to dealing with internal university material or small personal collections. When you have several map cases of Pullman drawings, 30 miles of motion picture film, and 100,000 slides, can the staff handle it? Often you need to find someone specialized in dealing with this volume. Then after it is rehoused and cataloged, will it be scanned? How does the public access the materials? Increasingly cultural heritage uses electronic tools to improve collections access and make material much more widely available then it would have been before.
It takes a lot of thought and effort to preserve collections. It can also take a lot of time, with arrangements made decades ahead of time. There are great amateur archivists out there that will do a great job, there are lousy pros out there too. You just need to do the legwork to find the right combinations of mission, resources, and personalities to determine where and how your collections get saved.

This is why I suggested sending a list to the institution in question-they should (most will) review the list for material that is out of scope. Northwestern University might consider your Garrett books.

They would not be interested in a book on the housekeeper in The Facts of Life, or on an attic for old maids to live in.

Remember, kids, spelling is important even in the era of "spell-check."

You kind of asked an impossible question, and then didn't return to answer the followups!

First question, how can we determine if an institution will be around 50-100 years from now? We can't!

Think about the last 100 years. How many seemingly rock-solid institutions have gone under? For that matter, entire countries have vanished!

Who can predict what the world will look like in a century, or what a "library" will even mean then.

But in terms of shorter term metrics, others have given good advice in this thread.

Get the organization's collections scope and collections management policy.

Look at the organization's governance structure. Does it recognize the importance of the collection. Are there safeguards in place to protect the collection? Are AAM recommended practices and ethics followed?

How accessible is the organization's collection to researchers and the general public?

Is the organization financially sound? Look at the 990s. Is there an endownment, and/or a reserve fund?

But ultimately, you may not find a perfect home. The Smithsonian checks all the boxes, but chances are (unless you have something of unusual rarity) they are not interested. So then it's a shopping process. What organization appears to be the best fit for my collection and gives it the best chance for being preserved long-term? Those two things are not necessarily going to mesh.

Here’s an idea - do what you can to preserve what you have for the future.

If you have a collection of physical items - photograph them from all different angles, take notes on the history and create an online version of your collection and back it up to a hard drive.

If you have a collection of media - scan it and do the same thing (provided it’s public domain).

The beauty of living in 2024 is we can all be archivists if we have an iPhone!

Heck, make short videos of you talking about and showing your collection. Then when your kids / grandkids watch them, they will know why you cared about collecting old train stuff.

No.

That's just being a different kind of "collector." Or even "hoarder."

An archivist's concerns are not only preserving data and items, but facilitating their preservation, access and use by future generations.

Uploading all your worthy photos to an online railroad photo archive, along with appropriate cataloging, identification, etc. MIGHT be a step in the right direction. But even then there are no guarantees that "RailroadPhotos.com" or whatever will be there five years from now, let alone fifty or two hundred.

Cautionary tale: Look up BridgeHunter.com, once one of the most valuable resources for bridge researchers in North America. It's been over a year now................
Second cautionary tale: Look up Don Ross' excellent North American diesel locomotive site.

Ok.. you can throw it all in the trash if you want to cause one day we will all be dead and no one will care.

If that's where you stopped reading and comprehending, then there's nothing we can do for you.

I mean honestly, that's the truth... what do any of us have that some museum is going to consider a prize possession? When we are dead literally nobody will care about our collection.

If you actually want to share your collection.. do it! Take pictures, scan texts, put it online - make video blogs about your old lantern collection. Share your interest.

What is the goal otherwise?