[Rockhounds] The Vaux collection at the Academy of Science in Phily

[Tim Jokela Jr.]

Well, obviously, all the people that howled about the sale of the collection 
will be volunteering to unpack, identify, clean, label, store, display, and 
curate it into infinity.

Any funding required to do the above will of course come from the same 
people.

I'm all for material being conserved in museums, provided the museums have 
the will, the staff, and the funding to properly curate it. If the museums 
are lacking; if they're just mindlessly accumulating, then why shouldn't 
they try to figure out what they're good at, what their purpose is, and get 
the stuff that they're not going to properly curate on the market where the 
specimens will find loving homes.

Cheers,

Tim Jokela Jr., tjokela at execulink.com
Business: http://www.element51.com
Pleasure: http://www.ontariominerals.com


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rock Currier" <rockcurrier at cs.com>
To: <rockhounds at lists.drizzle.com>
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2007 1:03 PM
Subject: [Rockhounds] The Vaux collection at the Academy of Science in Phily


> The Academy is not going to sell the Vaux collection and has instead 
> placed a staff paleontologist in charge of the collection. Is this 
> something that we should be glad about? The gentleman is probably very 
> well qualified for caring for fossils, and I am sure that somewhere in his 
> early training he had a geology course where he learned how to distinguish 
> calcite and gypsum from quartz & pyrite, but one wonders how many of the 
> specimens in the Vaux collection he could identify without looking at 
> their labels. So now what will become of the collection? A small token 
> display of the minerals in a prominent place in the Academy till the heat 
> dies down? And of the rest of the collection? Placed in a remote a 
> location as they can manage? How many people saw the collection during the 
> last 40 years? Probably less than 100. How many will see it during the 
> next two generations? Certainly not very many. They just don't have the 
> staff to hold peoples hands while they go through the drawers. Would it 
> not be better to have sold the things to collectors where the specimens 
> would be much more widely available and seen. At least the collectors 
> would know what they are and how much they are worth. No one at the 
> Academy does.
>
> Rock
>
>
> -- 
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