Next week, the Penn Cultural Heritage Center (PennCHC) at the University of Pennsylvania‘s Penn Museum will launch a first-of-its-kind survey exploring the collecting practices in place at museums and libraries across America. This endeavor, titled the National Survey of Museum Collecting Practices, is one of several initiatives under the auspices of the Museums: Missions and Acquisitions Project, also known as the M2A Project, which PennCHC launched in October 2024. The forthcoming survey will collect information on policies, acquisitions, deaccessions, and more from May 20 through August 20. Results will be available in 2027.
“We know a great deal about what museums display, but far less about how they acquire, borrow, deaccession, and return objects,” PennCHC’s executive director and the project’s co-principal investigator Richard M. Leventhal said in press materials about the survey, which he added “will help us understand this for the first time on a national scale.”
The Penn Museum is intimately aware of this matter’s increasing import. In 1970, the Philadelphia-based institution became the first American museum to limit incoming antiquities. But, the museum also faced ire in 2020, after students discovered that 55 skulls in its 1,300-piece Morton Cranial Collection once belonged to enslaved people. The Penn Museum announced plans to repatriate those skulls the following spring. Soon after, however, it came under fire again for allowing remains recovered from the 1985 MOVE police bombing to be used in a forensic anthropology course. The Penn Museum has since continued sponsoring archaeological missions abroad.
The Penn Museum. Courtesy of the Penn Museum
The three-year M2A Project took shape in 2024 courtesy of a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The project also arose from PennCHC’s Cultural Property Experts On Call Program—itself a product of PennCHC’s 2020 partnership with the U.S. Department of State’s Cultural Heritage Coordinating Committee, which aims to rescue international relics from trafficking.
A PennCHC spokesperson told me over email that the Donald Trump administration has not endangered this partnership, stating that antiquities trafficking “has always been a bipartisan issue.” Beyond the new survey, the M2A Project is also conducting “open-source data collection” and “programs with practitioners,” that spokesperson added.
Nevertheless, PennCHC believes the national survey will prove the M2A Project’s most fruitful endeavor. More than 50 museum experts helped to develop the questionnaire, which will solicit both qualitative and quantitative data from qualifying U.S.-based nonprofit respondents relating to acquisitions, incoming loans, and deaccessions handled over the past three years, as well as ownership resolutions completed over the past decade. The survey will request additional information on collecting practices and collections-related policies, staffing, and procedures, such as provenance research activity.
“Every question reflects something the field needs to benchmark, from the types of cultural objects museums are acquiring, accepting on loan, and returning to claimants, to the review procedures and provenance research activities that inform these decisions,” Kayla Kane, PennCHC’s associate director of cultural property programs, said in a statement. “The results will empower institutions to collect and steward cultural objects responsibly and to build stronger cases for the resources they need.”
PennCHC alone will have access to the information participants provide. Its resulting report—which will be accessible online for free upon publication in 2027—promises to only feature generalized insights, in order to maintain respondents’ anonymity. The report intends to enhance transparency around how American museums are comporting themselves these days, while also helping to set sorely needed best practices for such institutions moving forward.
“We hope that the National Survey of Museum Collections Practice can be implemented on an ongoing three-year cycle to track ongoing change in the profession,” the PennCHC spokesperson noted. “Future surveys will be dependent upon funding availability.”
