#deaccessioning

Museums and COVID-19: from Deaccessioning to Reopening

Deaccessioning is the official disposal of items within a library collection, which generally entails selling those items in order to raise money for the library. In the early 1970s, several of the Society’s dozen incunables were deaccessioned; there was a lot of change happening to the Society’s collection during the ’70s, and the deaccessioning of these incunables appear to go hand-in-hand with AAS lessening its focus on the general history of printing within the collection. I tried to discover where the texts went after being a part of our collection, but although the American Antiquarian Society Proceedings of 1873 and 1879 list these incunables as being owned by the Society, during the short time I was at AAS I was not able to find the records that indicate who bought them during their deaccessioning.

In recent weeks, however, the oldest museum in Pittsfield, the Berkshires’ largest town, has divided the local community, prompted an investigation by the Massachusetts attorney general, and placed this bucolic county at the center of a firestorm. The cause is the announcement, back in July, that the Berkshire Museum’s trustees had voted to consign, or “deaccession,” forty of its most valuable art works. Starting in November, Sotheby’s will sell these masterpieces off to the highest bidder, with no real hope that any of them will return to the Berkshires.

Joan Connelly, a renowned art expert, nationally known archaeologist, professor, and winner of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, has strongly criticized the Toledo Museum of Art’s auction of nearly 70 antiquities originally from Egypt and other countries.

MASTERPIECE - i don’t hate this ep. 23