“Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations.”

– Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

I have grey hair. The consensus is that its due to my two teenage daughters. Because I have teenagers, I spend too much time considering their college education, the impending cost of which is the largest contributor to my grey. Boyfriends aren’t helping either, but I think I have it in check by reenacting this masterclass performance, sometimes minus the expletives, by Martin Lawrence and Will Smith in Bad Boys II when meeting a potential suitor for the first time.

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Sorry to disappoint, but this is not a post about the dalliances of museum directors. I’ll admit that would be a great one and I’ll do some research, in the meantime you can do worse than read Holly Witchey’s excellent Cocktail at the Museum: A Museums Matter Mystery, for insight into the shenanigans that go on in museums.

As the lessons of the Getty Foundation’s five-year Online Scholarly Catalog Initiative (OSCI) come to bear, with a toolkit developed by IMALab and delivered online scholarly publications from AIC, LACMA, SAM, SFMOMA and Tate, the number one lesson institutions should learn is that print and digital are a marriage not a divorce. Unfortunately, this is a rocky marriage, it’s increasingly harder to see who the breadwinner is, and print is being raised (or lowered depending on your viewpoint) to trophy-wife status: costly and only trotted out for special occasions.

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AAMD have some pretty specific guidelines around deaccessioning. You can do it as long as the money you get from it is used as investment for your collection. You cannot use it to pay off your utility bills or offset the bath you took on that highly-publicized travelling exhibit that flopped like a Disney summer blockbuster. In the same way that Disney doesn’t ask its movie-going public what kind of movie it wants, neither do museums, although that may be about to change.

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