The articles all dealt with an area of museums that I am very unfamiliar with which is how they conduct business. I always knew there has been a controversy over some museums, such as the British Museum, in what they take and whether or not it was taken lawfully. However, I never knew how in depth the process was and the laws put into effect because of it. “Deft Deliberations” confronted a very important topic with regards to the rights of Native American’s and the objects museum’s have acquired. Monroe and Echo-Hawk noted that “one of the many ‘trail of tears’ in American Indian history is the fact that U.S. museums and universities hold staggering numbers of dead native people who provide mute testimony to the pervasive violation of Native American rights.” (73) Knowing where, and how, a museum acquired its belongings is very important, I think the public should be aware of it as well. I have a hard time believing that the public would find museums dishonestly filling their displays as acceptable conduct. That being said, the article really set the stage for the coming articles in the sense that each one dealt with honest and dishonest methods museums used to acquire their items.
In Malaro’s article on deaccessioning, she explained the issues museums have with removing items from their exhibits. Where do they go? The codes listed by the AAM included some vital rules for museums to abide by, especially number 2 “When considering disposal, the museum must weigh carefully the interests of the public that it serves.” (80) One thing that really troubled me was the idea that since museums are a nonprofit organization, the governing board has the authority to dispose of what they want to get rid of, without getting permission from anyone else. What troubles me about that is they might overlook how the public feels or the historical significance of certain items in the museum and get rid of them. Like Malaro pointed out on page 84, they should use outside opinions to decide what to get rid of. Fiona Cameron’s article “Museum Collections, Documentation, and Shifting Knowledge Paradigms” included another troubling feature to me, that museum collecting “are rooted in 19th-century empiricist modes of thinking.” (223) The fact that many of them did not upgrade to keep up with the changing technology seems odd to me. If, as Cameron mentioned “collections management databases are the primary means in which museums document their collections,” (224) why haven’t they upgraded their methods? It seems, after reading these articles, there is a lot of work for museums to do in order to keep up with the 21st century.