U.S. Museums Are Being Asked to Reveal How They Collect, Deaccession, and Return Objects
A new national survey is set to probe one of the museum field’s least visible areas: how institutions decide what to acquire, borrow, deaccession, and return. The Penn Cultural Heritage Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Museum will launch the National Survey of Museum Collecting Practices on May 20, with responses accepted through August 20.
The questionnaire is part of the Museums: Missions and Acquisitions Project, or M2A Project, which PennCHC launched in October 2024 with support from a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. More than 50 museum experts helped develop the survey, which is aimed at U.S.-based nonprofit museums and libraries. It will collect both qualitative and quantitative information on acquisitions, incoming loans, deaccessions, ownership resolutions, collections policies, staffing, procedures, and provenance research.
Richard M. Leventhal, PennCHC’s executive director and a co-principal investigator on the project, said in press materials that museums are far better understood for what they display than for how they manage objects behind the scenes. The survey, he said, is intended to clarify that process on a national scale for the first time.
PennCHC says it alone will have access to participant information. The resulting report, expected in 2027 and promised free online, will present only generalized findings to preserve anonymity. The center hopes the data will improve transparency and help establish best practices for institutions navigating increasingly complex questions around collecting and repatriation.
The Penn Museum’s own history makes it a pointed setting for the project. In 1970, it became the first American museum to limit incoming antiquities. More recently, it faced scrutiny after students discovered that 55 skulls in its 1,300-piece Morton Cranial Collection had belonged to enslaved people. The museum said it would repatriate those remains the following spring. It later drew criticism again over its use of remains recovered from the 1985 MOVE police bombing in a forensic anthropology course.
Kayla Kane, PennCHC’s associate director of cultural property programs, said the survey was designed to benchmark the field’s practices, from the kinds of cultural objects museums are acquiring and returning to the review procedures and provenance research that shape those decisions. PennCHC also says the M2A Project includes open-source data collection and programs with practitioners.
If funding continues, the center hopes to repeat the survey on a three-year cycle, creating a longer record of how museum practice is changing.
