A Work in Progress Development of United States National Park Service Museum Collection Significance Evaluation Criteria

Abstract

This article describes the National Park Service's (NPS) progress in an ongoing effort to develop museum collection significance criteria for its geology, paleontology, biology, archeology, ethnography/ethnology, history, and archival collections. The goal is to create sets of significance criteria that are practical, flexible, recognize the associative value of the NPS's collections, and provide continuity and context for the stewardship of collections over time. Effective significance criteria will increase the intellectual understanding of collections; inform and record collection acquisition and deaccession; and assist in management decisions related to collections. This is an immense undertaking complicated by differences among disciplines and a large geographic scope. The significance criteria effort requires agency support through a national staff coordinator and funding for the final development and implementation phases.

Recovering Looted Artifacts and the Art of Deciding What to Curate: The Cerberus Collection

“…The BLM gained insights from other proposed significance criteria (see Racine et al 2009). However, such guides had limited applicability because they rely on context and provenience, which are limited to unknown in this case.…”

A Checklist for Sustainable Management of Archaeological Collections

“…How long is “long-term?” Is this time frame a reasonable standard by which to preserve all archaeological collections when many are orphaned or deteriorate without Enhancement and the process is underfunded? What methods could be implemented to control the growth of collections that enhance research value, such as a complete inventory of collections curated by state, to yield better decision-making about new fieldwork (Sullivan 1993) or significance criteria to evaluate the long-term research value of collections (Jamieson 2015; Racine et al 2009; Schacht 2011)? Archaeological repository personnel should work with the professional archaeological community, including government cultural resource managers, to begin to address these questions.…”

Significance Assessment as Citizen Science: A Collaborative Methodology for Developing the Significance of Our Collections?

“… 7. Reed (2018), Häyhä et al (2019), Versloot (2014), Falkenberg and Jander (2018), CyMAL (2013), Furthermore, a number of projects focusing on defining significance have been undertaken – for example De la Torre (2002), Racine et al (2009) and Miller et al (2022). …”

“… 26. For example Racine et al (2009), Frensley et al (2017), Eitzel et al (2017), Vohland et al (2021), Eleta et al (2019), Oswald (2020), Miller et al (2022). …”