Schollaardt abstract 2007

Taking care of collections of different ownership, or, how the Geldmuseum deals with legal and practical differences in handling collections of different owners: Christel Schollaardt, Geldmuseum, Utrecht

The Geldmuseum, is founded in 2004 by 4 founding fathers:
The Dutch Department of Education, Culture and Science, the Department of Public Finance, the Dutch Bank and the Royal Dutch Mint.

The collections we take care of have different owners:

 

  1. the State collection of numismatic objects owned by the Department of Education, Culture and Science, before our merger in custody of the Royal Coin Cabinet at Leiden.
  2. another State collection of numismatic objects and production gear, owned by the Department of Public Finance, before the merger being taken care for by the Dutch Mint Museum at Utrecht,
  3. the numismatic collection of the Dutch Bank, before the merger housed at the Dutch Bank in Amsterdam,
  4. the collections of the Royal Dutch Mint, founded since 1994, the year of the self-dependencing of the Dutch Mint, formerly part of the Department of Finance, containing also numismatics and production gear, but also organisational history.
  5. a numismatic collection, owned by the Friends of the Museum.


For all of these collections we have agreements with the owners, describing the responsibilities of the different parties, the span of control, the matter of reports and inspections.

In 1995, the Department of Education, Culture and Science (OCW), responsible for the largest part of the Dutch Museums, decided to give the state museums self-dependency. The Royal Dutch Coin Cabinet was one of them. Because of the size of the museum and the housing in the Museum of Antiquities at Leiden, this situation was not very promising for the Coin cabinet. This is why the merger plans are born in the first place.

But because of the self-dependency of the museums, taking care of State collections, the Government decided to install an institution for inspection the Rijksinspectie voor Cultuurbezit, the Inspection of Cultural Heritage. The Inspection visits the museums once a year, inspecting the care and registration of the collections. It is also concerned with matters of security, riskmanagement and so on.

All of the collections in custody of the Geldmuseum are inspected by the Inspection for Cultural Heritage. That is a start.

A difficulty lies in the collections of the Royal Dutch Mint; a large part of those collections consists of production gear, coin dies, medal casts an so on, also machinery. The problem is that the Mint actually wants to use these pieces for production means, and as you will understand, that is not how we museum people or the Inspection look at the matter.

Possible solutions lie in giving back pieces in custody of the Mint itself.

A second option might be a different status for several parts of the collection, such as the casts and dies. Each solution has its own difficulties which I will explain later.

Another problem we have to deal with is assigning new acquisitions to the different collections. There are many divisions possible:

 

  •  amount of money the concerning founding father is paying,
  • collection profiles
  • even parts
  • etc.

Conclusion: a merger of different collections of different owners produces lots of questions in collection management, on which we try to find answers which serve both the museum people as well as the owners.

"back to Vienna programme":http://www.icomon.org.uk/meetings/31/vienna-programme