GUIDELINES FOR THE CURATION OF GEOLOGICAL MATERIALS

custodial duties. It is suggested that the philosophical approach of all curators
should be firmly rooted in the ethic that disposal under certain circumstances can
be legitimate but should only be considered as a last resort.
Accepting that as the basic premise, it is essential to consider and to validate
ethically situations which may arise when disposal may actually be desirable.
Museums are in the business of not only acquiring but also looking after objects
and information, and so, in the interests of the collection as a whole, or
significant parts of that collection, it may be possible to justify disposal of certain
objects or collections, in certain ways.
This kind of ethical approach has been developed to an even greater practical
extent by various North American institutions (see Nicholson 1974a & b, Neal et
al. 1978, Malaro 1979, Hitchcock 1980, Nat. Mus. Canada 1981). For these
institutions the disposal of specimens is considered to be an integral part of a
good collections management policy.
This section is concerned with the disposal of material which has been formally
acquired by the institution, or in other words has been fully catalogued as part of
the main collections, as well as material that has entered the museum and has
some form of Entry Documentation, short of full acquisition, and material that
has no formal documentation at all. (Curators who acquire material specifically
for exchange or sale to other institutions must maintain such material discrete
from the main collections and maintain separate documentation for it.)
Similarly, the inadvertent loss by destruction, theft, etc. of fully acquired
material falls outside these considerations (but see B6.2.1). Full documentation
should be maintained for all classes of material removed from the museum.
6.2.2.1. Situation covered by the guidelines
The disposal of collections or specimens from a museum justified on the basis of
good collections management may be by gift, exchange, sale or destruction.
Reasons for disposal may be by means of:
improving the collection by exchange;
improving the collection by the disposal of inferior material made obsolete
by the acquisition of better or more relevant material;
improving the collection by applying the proceeds of the sale of specimens;
protecting the collection by deliberate destruction of inferior material or
material that has deteriorated too greatly to be of use, or therby endangering
other materials;
gaining scientific information by the deliberate, controlled, partial or
complete destruction of specimens for the purposes of research;
placing collections where they can be properly cared for, thus safeguarding
important material.
6.2.2.2. Ethical and other general considerations
In museums, the public interest (in a legal and ethical sense) is of major
importance. This should be interpreted to include consideration of both scientific
and lay communities.
Subject to these legal and ethical constraints, in formulating these Guidelines
we have taken the best interest of the science, geology, as pre-eminent.
The good interest of the collections themselves is seen to be subject to the two