May 2021 collection deaccession

Golden History Museum & Park piloted a Legacy Collection Inventory Project in winter 2019 designed to reappraise the existing collection on hand when the City of Golden commenced museum management in 2010. Now a museum priority, project goals include conducting a complete physical inventory of everything housed at offsite museum storage, updating and improving records, rehousing artifacts when necessary, and finally, reappraising all artifacts for relevancy to museum mission and scope of collection. Now over two years into the project, curatorial staff have inventoried approximately 5,409 artifacts (about 36% of 15,073 cataloged artifacts currently in collection). Note: this artifact count includes all collection inventory activity, and is not limited to the official legacy collection project. At this pace we anticipate completion in 2025.

A list of 368 artifacts from the permanent collection will be recommended for deaccession May 18, opening a monthlong window for public comment. (This is the third in a series since 2019.) Per policy, Deaccessioning of any object in the GHM&P Permanent Collection will be recommended by GHM&P curatorial staff after careful consideration of the object as it relates to the GHM&P mission statement and scope of collections.