[Nhcoll-l] Collections insurance values

[Peter Rauch]

It would seem that a "scientific" specimen's value today would depend
greatly not only on the cost of a field collecting trip, but also on the
very potential of being able to collect "equivalent" (whatever that means)
genetic samples, which may be not only time period dependent (specimens
sampled from populations of 50/100/200 years ago), but also locality
dependent (locality/habitat conditions that no longer exists).

Such variational representation that those specimens lost from our
scientific collections has become so much more meaningful (detectable,
analyzable, interpretable, valuable) with today's scientific knowledge and
understanding. One can not simply buy more of the same specimens with the
price of a field trip.

How would those lost or significantly altered situations affect the
replacement (if that is what it is to be called) valuation of lost
specimens ?

Peter



On Sun, Jul 27, 2014 at 7:36 PM, Brown, Matthew A <matthewbrown at utexas.edu>
wrote:

> Dear list,
>
> We've recently been in discussions with the University's Risk Assessment
> office about their annual (?) policy update. I know that when they visited
> last about five years ago, we gave them a ballpark of $1-1.5k cost of
> replacement per specimen for our paleontological collections. In this
> recent conversation, they sent a section from the Fine Arts policy stating
> more or less that loss of "archeological" objects will only be paid out at
> fair market value, not cost of replacement from the field. I've let them
> know that as scientific collections, they don't have commercial value, and
> that the only way we could rebuild a similar collection is through field
> work. Risk Management is checking with the insurance company for
> clarification, and I'm asking for input from the community to find out how
> other institutions handle this issue. We've been round on this with customs
> declaration values before, but I can't think of a resource for this
> particular issue.
>
> Any advice would be appreciated.
>
> With thanks,
>
>
> Matthew A. Brown, M.Sc.
> Head of Collections, Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory
> Lecturer, Department of Geological Sciences
> Jackson School of Geosciences
> The University of Texas at Austin
> R7600, Austin, TX 78758
> Office:(512)232-5515
> matthewbrown at utexas.edu
> jsg.utexas.edu/vpl
> _______________________________________________
> Nhcoll-l mailing list
> Nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
> http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/nhcoll-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> NHCOLL-L is brought to you by the Society for the Preservation of
> Natural History Collections (SPNHC), an international society whose
> mission is to improve the preservation, conservation and management of
> natural history collections to ensure their continuing value to
> society. See http://www.spnhc.org for membership information.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/nhcoll-l/attachments/20140728/3220a962/attachment.html