To Deaccession or Not to Deaccession?

According to this piece published in the New York Times earlier this week, the Philadelphia History Museum has been selling pieces from its collection to finance the first major renovations to the building since the 1940's.

The museum desperately needed to weed out some pieces from its collection. It did not have the space or the budget to care for a collection of that size. The building also needed to be renovated and updated. (Nancy Moses hints at the difficulties faced by the museum in her book Lost in the Museum: Buried Treasures and the Stories They Tell.) The museum would need to raise incredibly large sums of money in order to complete these upgrades.

I sympathize with the museum's argument that the money obtained from the sale of various historic objects goes entirely toward ensuring the preservation and safety of what remains in the collection, but the whole process leaves a sour taste in my mouth. This situation is different from other institutions making news recently for deaccessioning objects to pay for daily operating costs. I also recognize that the intentions of the museum's staff are very good. They are attempting to do what is best for the museum and its collection. But did no other options for raising money exist?

According to the "News" section on the museum's website, the museum has received various grants and other sources of funding. I find it hard to believe that these sources, as well as individual donors, were tapped before resorting to auctioning off parts of the collection to the highest bidder.

I fear that deaccessioning has become, for many museums, an easy way to fund projects that might otherwise be hard too expensive or difficult to finance rather than a means of acquiring better or more representative pieces for the collection. Deaccessioning should not be the means by which a museum funds its daily operations or its renovations.