Advisory committee recommends removal of 93 items from St. Marys Museum collection

This commemorative Gettysburg plate has been identified for removal from the St. Marys Museum’s collection because it has no display value at the museum because of its lack of provenance and relevance to the Town of St. Marys.

By Galen Simmons, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

The St. Marys heritage and culture advisory committee has recommended the removal or deaccessioning of 93 items from the St. Marys Museum’s collection, nearly all of which are in poor condition, are duplicates of other items in the collection, or have a lack of provenance.

At the committee’s first meeting of the year Jan. 8, town cultural services manager Amy Cubberley and museum curatorial and programming assistant Izzy Mitchell presented the first third of the nearly 300 items identified for removal from the museum collection as part of a deaccession project that has been in the works for roughly a decade.

“This is our first major deaccessioning project in my time at the museum,” Cubberley said. “ … We have been gearing up for this project for about 10 years with having students working on condition reports and updating all of our artifact catalogues, and doing audits. I’ve had several summer students and interns kind of start the project and Izzy has kind of gotten us over that hurdle of actually getting artifacts before the committee for review.”

According to Mitchell, there are numerous guidelines and restrictions around how a museum goes about removing items from its collection. In reviewing the museum’s collection over the last decade, staff considered several factors including the overall condition of the items, their provenance and connection to St. Marys, whether they are direct or indirect duplicates of other items in the collection, their display value at the museum, and any hazards associated with those items.

While none of the items recommended for removal were deemed hazardous, Mitchell said the museum’s policy for adding items to its collection and its recordkeeping practices prior to the 1970s means many of these items lack any kind of backstory or provenance and have very little display value. On top of that, most of the items are broken or are in various states of deterioration.

“We have very limited storage space,” Mitchell said of the reason for the deaccession project. “ … We really only have two spaces that are up to our peak standards – humidity, temperature control, all of that – and that would be our textile room and the basement. These spaces right now are essentially overflowing. We have furniture in the aisles we have to kind of manoeuvre around to access the shelves, so that’s a big hurdle for us. It also, due to that, limits our ability to follow best practices for artifact handling and monitoring.

“Hypothetically, we really shouldn’t be stacking artifacts on top of each other, but we really don’t have a choice right now.”

According to Cubberley, the museum currently has about 15,000 artifacts in its collection. The nearly 300 artifacts identified for removal – the remainder of which will be brought to the committee for review in the next few months – represent roughly two per cent of the museum’s collection.

Should St. Marys council approve the committee recommendation to remove the first 93 items from the collection, Mitchell said the museum will need to follow a specified process for how those items will be removed from the collection.

First, she said the museum will offer the items to other museums to potentially add them to their collections. After that, the remaining items will be offered to public and educational institutions. The museum will then work with a private auction house to sell off any leftover items, and anything that still remains in the museum’s possession after that will be destroyed and disposed of.

Cubberley said the museum’s goal is to keep as many of the removed items out of landfill as possible, however Mitchell noted the potentially limited appeal the items have for other museums, public and educational institutions, and private buyers because of their poor condition and lack of provenance.