Review: Valuing your collection (2017)
Jennifer Sainato
Freda Matassa. Valuing your collection: a practical guide for museums, libraries and archives. Facet Publishing, 2017. 224 p., £ 59.99 (softcover), ISBN 978–1–78330–187–4.
As a collection management professional, whenever I attend a talk on insuring collections against risk I usually leave completely frustrated. The speakers, generally insurance industry specialists in fine arts coverage for museums and private collectors, speak about the “value” of a collection in terms of market value: the value of a collection consists of its replacement costs. But what do you do if you oversee a collection that, in these terms, is valueless? That is, you provide access to material that has great cultural significance, especially when placed in the context of a larger collection, but would garner little to no interest in the resale market or is even legally proscribed against resale? Valuing your collection: a practical guide for museums, libraries and archives is the first published effort that I’ve encountered that examines the concept of valuation for these types of institutions and closely examines how collections that are worthy rather than costly can approach valuation and utilize it to improve decision making and risk management.
Freda Matassa, a former Head of Collections Management at Tate Galleries, uses the 2012 European Commission-sponsored report she co-authored with Dr. Cornelia Dümke entitled Valuation of Works of Art for Lending and Borrowing Purposes as a jumping off point for a larger inquiry into the subject of valuation for cultural collections. That report found that there was little in the way of standard methodology for assigning financial value to public collections and that collections managers were at times uncomfortable assigning value to cultural materials. This discomfort and the oft-competing considerations of value versus price can create stumbling blocks for collecting institutions when conducting long-term planning, arranging insurance, and managing exhibits. While Matassa focuses on fine arts institutions in this book, she also addresses the challenges for archives, libraries, and research collections when attempting to put a price on a collection that may have great significance but little in the way of market value.
The book begins with a discussion of the importance of valuation and how the huge amount of revenue generated by the “cultural industries” has led museums, libraries, and archives to view their collections as organizational assets. There are many instances in which knowledge of the monetary value of these assets can assist in decision making, including acquisition, lending and borrowing, insuring, preservation planning, and deaccessioning. Matassa provides important templates and addresses significant topics such as legal and ethical considerations, alternative strategies for valuing research collections, factors affecting value, and suggested methodologies for conducting valuations. Interspersed throughout are case studies that look at the framework utilized by various collecting institutions and how they addressed the complexity of the decision-making process. The risks as well as the benefits of different approaches to valuation are discussed as well as reasonable expectations and outcomes of performing a valuation. Matassa presents templates for valuing entire collections as well as specific types of collections materials that are clearly described and supported with worksheets and the advice of subject specialists. She makes it clear that there are no easy answers; valuation is subjective and by definition it can fluctuate over time. This volume is not a how-to manual (even though the section on creating a valuation plan clearly lays out suggestions for contents and process) — it’s an acknowledgement of the complexity of the subject of valuation and an attempt to shed some light on a topic that has received little attention, especially outside of the fine arts discipline.
Matassa focuses primarily on practices within the United Kingdom and, to a lesser extent, the European Union. The section on law and ethics has little in it that is applicable to institutions in the U.S. but the list of potential concerns is certainly helpful. In the same manner, discussions regarding indemnity, insurance and auditing often discuss programs that do not have analogs for American professionals. Concepts reappear throughout the book but are often merely mentioned rather than thoroughly examined. Fastidious editing could have tightened and clarified the frequent overlaps and repetitions. Nevertheless, in the absence of any U.S. equivalent for this work, this volume is a welcome and much needed resource.
Jennifer Sainato is Preservation Services Manager at the Center for Jewish History, New York, NY.
