RENOVATION OF THE MINERAL COLLECTION AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

As many university Earth science departments face increasing pressure to reevaluate their priorities, the care and upkeep of geological collections may be overlooked during the restructuring of their programs. A recently adopted policy statement from the Mineralogical Society of America urges preservation of these collections when possible and responsible disposal when not. We are working to preserve Gem and Mineral Collection at the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University as a resource for education and research, while at the same time reducing drastically the space in which it is now housed.

Efforts are underway to catalog, inventory, and organize the Gem and Mineral Collection. The collection has been mostly inactive for at least thirty years, and our natural history museum, which displayed specimens from the collection, closed in 2000. We are constructing a digital database that will serve to make the collection available to the university and to the wider mineralogical community for research and educational purposes, either electronically or directly through loans. The collection will be organized and perhaps reduced in volume to comply with increasing space constraints in the department. The assignment of retention codes during cataloging will aid in the division of the collection and serve as a guide to future curatorial staff. The end result will be a more streamlined and available collection that preserves the essence of the original collection while requiring a minimum of upkeep.

Although we advocate the preservation of university collections in their entirety as unique and valuable resources, we recognize that space, time, and budgetary limitations are the reality. In some cases, the existence of important collections is unknown to all but a few individuals; we expect to raise awareness of and interest in these collections. We welcome discussion on these topics with those who have experience with managing such collections or who will be facing these concerns in the future.