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Museum exhibition files-- retention question



Fellow Archivists,

This is mostly a question for other museum archivists, although I would
welcome input from any one of you.

In our exhibition files we have lots of photocopied articles from various
publications that our curators used when doing research for exhibits.
Normally, it would be my instinct to discard these, as they are not
originals, not generated by our museum, and are available through other
sources, such as regular art libraries.  Not to mention the amount of space
they are taking up in the files! (We have over 500 feet of exhibition
records.)  Space is a major issue for our archives-- we really have little
room for future growth of our collections.

However, I was speaking about these articles with our Head of Libraries and
Archives and she pointed out that if anyone was researching a particular
exhibit they might be interested in knowing what sources the curators
consulted.  She also pointed out that some of the articles might require a
lot of time and energy to locate again and that it would be preferable to
keep these in case we needed them in the future.

I'd love to hear your opinions on this issue, especially from those of you
with experience writing retention schedules for museum archives.

Sammie Morris, CA
Archivist
Dallas Museum of Art
1717 North Harwood
Dallas, Texas 75201
Phone: (214) 922-1375
Fax: (214) 954-0174
Email: smorris@dm-art.org
Web: http://www.dm-art.org


Sammie Morris, CA
Archivist
Dallas Museum of Art
1717 North Harwood
Dallas, Texas 75201
Phone: (214) 922-1375
Fax: (214) 954-0174
Email: smorris@dm-art.org
Web: http://www.dm-art.org

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