This is a general discussion item intended to cover all museums - but - specifically railway museum because that is our main interest.

When a museum is gifted (either donated or using donated money) a collectable item, does the museum take on the responsibility of giving that item proper care and a good home "forever"? Understanding that some equipment was acquired as a parts source, when a donor gifts an item, does the donor and our public expect that we will be good caretakers of the item?

Is it OK to to sell the item later?
Is it OK to scrap the item later?
Is it OK to not take care of it and let the item go back to nature (self scrapping)?

If these actions are OK, then is all we are doing is running a delayed scrap yard, allowing people to take a tax deduction for their gift of equipment or cash?

If these actions are not OK, then how does a museum rid themselves of equipment they have? What happens if they can't find a good home but the equipment is taking up space now - preventing other items from getting covered space?

I would appreciate your thoughts.

Deleted. See my comments further down.

Your attention is called to Recommended Practices, a publication of the Association of Railway Museums.

http://www.railwaymuseums.org/static/documents/RecommendedPractices.pdf





Wesley

Not too interested in the legal issues. How about the general picture?

It's essential to get a signed Deed of Gift for any donation. I found a copy of one in my files:



Perhaps some of our attorney brethren could offer suggestions. I think that possibly developing a written set of policies and having the donor acknowledge receipt of (and agreement to) these policies as part of the deed would be a good idea.

Of course, any restrictions should be added to the deed and initialed both by the donor and the Museum (and obviously both parties get copies!).

Comments?

The second half of my post discussed this, but let me guess... TLDR.

FINE, IN GENERAL:
Consider a hypothetical. Suppose that railroad museums had to give their equipment proper care and a good home forever. That would mean that a donor's one time gift, would result in enormous and ongoing expense for the railroad museum forever.

It would be the railroad museum equivalent of getting knocked up.

This hypothetical does not work. Conclusion: railroad museums are not required to give proper care since it is beyond their ability.

The conclusion seems to be supported by science
http://www.flickr.com/photos/trainplane ... 599618922/ [Edit: Fixed per Mark's comment.]
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=28943
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23065916@N04/5660371712/
http://www.trainweb.org/morepower/dda40x.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lorenzobel ... 209364840/
http://www.newenglandrailfans.com/apps/ ... =114345830




Yeah, that's what you're doing :)

And I'm glad you're thinking about it.

Here's the problem. Carbarns take land. It needs to be your land, because building carbarns on someone else's land is really dumb. Good news is the real estate market is FAN-TASTIC right now. If your operation needs a railroad, you need to buy land next to a railroad that you can't be evicted from. Basically that means you need to own the railroad. Thus, the game plan:

1. Buy railroad
2. Buy land
3. Build carbarns


You review your collection policy and you deaccession what doesn't fit, and then you dispose of it according to best practices, e.g. offer to other museums.

But wait. If every railroad museum starts deaccessioning all the pieces they can't care for -- it will glut the market. A few museums are accepting, but they'll quickly have what they need and be out of the market. Everything else will not move, and will be scrapped. We're already pretty much there with just a few museums a year shaking out their collections. Imagine if everyone did it at once.

I once started a thread where I proposed that railway preservation has 2000 too many cars, and I dared forum members to list them. 40 per state, not so unreasonable. Well, as you can imagine, the discussion was pandemonium. Kinda like the discussion at any museum with a carbarn about what goes inside vs. out.

What I concluded is that the answer is not deaccession. It's building more carbarns.

The bottom line is that once a railroad museum gains ownership of an artifact, they can do whatever they want with it. They can restore it, paint it pink with purple flowers, sell it, trade it, or scrap it. Whether or not that artifact fits into the museum's mission statement or collection policy is irrelevant. Policies change, often in conjunction with a change in leadership. And some museums have disposed of artifacts that fell within the scope of their mission while actively preserving items that are not part of that mission. Basically, the Golden Rule applies: Whoever has the gold makes the rules.

The only way for a person to insure the preservation of an artifact is for him/her to own it privately. Yes, once he/she dies the artifact will probably be scrapped or sold on eBay by their heirs, but at least it'll be around and under their control during their lifetime and that's all anyone can do. I know that private ownership goes against the basic principles of preservation, but too many museums have developed their own agendas for them to be regarded as the best place for an artifact to go to.

Anyhows, just my $0.02 worth.

Charley:

Isn't that exactly what a potential donor what's to avoid? Isn't the reason you gift a museum and the museum accepts the gift? What do other non-railway museums do? They they sell off things they don't want any more - doesn't fit the collection, can't store it any longer, whatever the reason? Do they simply toss them in the trash? Sell them for whatever they can get? Isn't it a least implied that the Museum will be good caregivers for the item - making sure it has a good home - if not at that museum, another?

Again - I'm not interested in the LEGAL issues, but, the moral issues here.

I don't see how you separate the two (moral and legal). A gift is a gift. Once an object is museum property then the staff and board need to follow collections policy and other guidelines.

Wesley

That first link isn't really fair, considering that was the time after the 4012 had been powerwashed and before it had been repainted.

Mark: You are right, changed the link to refer to other things at Steamtown. My overriding point was to select "all the best" museums and illustrate that this is a universal problem.

Charley: I'm sorry you had friction with railroad museums but I don't agree with your assessment of museums generally. Either you had an unusual experience or you had unrealistic expectations - which I would point out happens a LOT, as collectors get into storage problems and expect museums to help them out. There's a fundamental difference in ideology: Control. By the time you pay Federal, state and sales taxes you're giving 50% of your money to the IRS. You're willing to do that to retain control. I use pretax dollars and get twice the preservation for my hard-earned... albeit at the loss of control. If
I screw up my relationship with the board, I am sunk. Each to our own I guess.

And yeah, museums are so bad that I can't blame a guy for assuming private owners do better. But when I studied it more closely, I found that was not the case at all. Museums do better as a rule. Better yet, as they continue to build carbarns.

The comment I found most amusing was "he who has the gold, makes the rules". The Western Railway Museum has far and away the biggest pot of gold in railway preservation, north of 7 million dollars. So I'm wondering who has this gold and makes those rules, because I'm on the board of directors of the joint and it's news to me!!! LOL!

Okay. Morally speaking, organizations don't have morals. People do. An organization is simply a lens to focus the efforts of people. Who are the PEOPLE who are morally responsible?

Should morality reflect only what people do, or also what people DON'T do??

Suppose Dean Donor offers to buy Engine #89 from the scrapper. The Board splits, Ned and Norm opposed because they can't care for it, Walt Will and Wallace say poor care is better than seeing it scrapped, and the museum may develop the capacity for its care in the future.

What happens there? What is the moral thing for each of them to do? Remembering that if the unit is not saved it will probably be scrapped directly instead of possibly in the future. The museum could yet still get a carbarn up.

What do you think?

Ever hear of an endowment? It's a large hunk of money that you keep forever and invest aggressively, same way a teenager would invest his IRA: you want growth and don't care about short term volatility. In that type of investment, you can safely draw off 4% to 5% every year, and the fund will still grow and keep up with inflation. It's a forever fund. Now, suppose to maintain a locomotive outdoors, it costs $1000/year. A $25,000 endowment would do the trick. That's not insane compared to the cost of buying and moving a locomotive. So a donor COULD provide for the perpetual care of the unit, eh?

Does the donor have a moral imperative to do so?

if he doesn't, who does?

What about all the equipment that's already at the museum?

Now suppose the museum builds a car-house of reasonable quality. It'll cost $25,000 worth of track length to fit the locomotive, and the endowment could buy just that, with nothing left. The car-house will drop the cost of care to a mere $200/year, but no endowment will survive to pay it. Should that be done?

1Railfan, entire graduate school courses are taught in collections management, though I'll be the first to say you don't need to learn the subject in a classroom--apprenticeship in the field works just fine, too.

My real point is, there is a long and deep system of practice among museum professionals that covers all this ground. To get the lay of the land, you can start with Simmons, Buck, and Malaro, all in this list:

http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&rh=n%3A ... ent&page=1

If you want to learn how professional museums do it, read away.

To give you a tip off the bat that goes to your core question, though, a process for controlling addition of objects to the collection (accessioning) and for responsible pruning of the collection through sale, trade, or gift (deaccessioning), is a basic principle of collections management. Current professional best practice is never to accept anything but an unrestricted transfer of title (no "permanent loans", no promises to the donor never to sell or dispose of the object or to have it always on display, etc.) and to have a documented, thoughtful process for when and how to remove objects. This is not unethical--on the contrary, it's professional malpractice not to have such policies.

Erik: Let's assume that all Museum's are NOW thinking hard about what to acquire, the costs, how it fits in, ....

What about the items left over when everyone took anything offered them? What becomes of those items? Most are now just "kicked to the curb" and either left to rot or scrapped when no other museum can offer a new home due to today's very difficult and expense to move the older equipment. Kind of sad, IMHO.

Sad but inevitable, to a degree. "We can't save everything" gets tossed around like a glib mantra, but it's true.

Think about this in terms of antique autos. When I was growing up, it was 1920s and 1930s cars that were the "rage," with a few really vintage 1900s and 1910s cars showing up now and then. Nowadays, a great many of those cars are now either squirreled away in museums or stuffed in the back of garages while 1950s cars are the "in thing" at antique car shows and gatherings. Eventually there will be a day when someone's going to be trying to argue to get a registration for a still-functional 150- or 200-year-old automobile, but those folks will be the odd one out among the antique Hyundais, Priuses, Scions, SmartCars, Minis, and whatnot (oh, and the few guys in the Edsel and Chevy Volt Club--both equally rare).

Now, extend the same mentality to a place like Britain or Japan, where you almost can't throw a stone without it landing on the site of something historic, or even something of terrific antiquity still in use. I've stood on a harbour dock in Scotland that, as best as anyone could tell, had been in use since the 1200s, with the current stone walls in place since the early 1800s, and fishing boats were unloading their catches on them.

One of my side interests is historic bridge preservation. For every historic bridge I've worked to help preserve (typically covered bridges), I've had to accept the loss of another in spite of preservationists' best efforts (arson, floods, impossibility of moving a cast concrete-arch bridge, neglect, new railroad, etc.). And in the long run, that's OK--it means we can better justify working to save the bridges that weren't historic when I was a little kid, but are now.

Every museum should have a long-term objective, be it to expand, improve what they have, or simply continue to perpetuate the relevance (and, it goes without saying, existence) of what they have in future years. Occasionally, that may mean "Okay, we can take in that original Light Rail vehicle/AEM7/B40-8, but it means we have to stop pretending that chicken coop carbody/F-M switcher/caboose out back is ever going to get restored....."