3rd February 2012, 01:28 PM
Yes i agree that the best should be available for public viewing, but most items acquired by Museums reside in the basement or external storehouse and dont see the light of day except when a researcher wants to examine any if ever. We see this with the proliferation of archive material over the last few decades from developer lead excavations and the problem of what to do with it never mind store it. Some see the on site cull of material as a way forward so that only a representative sample of some material reaches the archive. What happens to the remainder ? Probably backfilled with the rest of the excavation area as the developer moves in.
Yet humans are an acquisitive species and i am sure that some of this material ends up in "teaching" collection shoeboxes. Scholarship of small finds is the way forward in respect to detector finds, (which was the target of ZSilvia) and once that information has been gathered by recording what is the problem with finder/landowner retention. There seems little point in adding fresh "run of the mill" material to an already overburdened museums service which has probably already got hundreds of similar items in store.
Yet humans are an acquisitive species and i am sure that some of this material ends up in "teaching" collection shoeboxes. Scholarship of small finds is the way forward in respect to detector finds, (which was the target of ZSilvia) and once that information has been gathered by recording what is the problem with finder/landowner retention. There seems little point in adding fresh "run of the mill" material to an already overburdened museums service which has probably already got hundreds of similar items in store.