Donate a collection to a museum

1. Choose the museum by fit, not by size: the regional museum for regional material, the museum with an active curator in your group of fossils, the university collection that teaches from it. Look at their collections policy online — most say what they collect and what they do not.

2. Write to the curator with a short description and the catalogue export: number of specimens, what they are, where from, what documentation exists, and photographs of the best twenty. Stratum's Estate Package export is built for this letter. Say whether you want to donate all, some, or to let them choose.

3. Expect selection. Curators take material with locality and horizon data, type or figured specimens, material from sites now closed, and material that fills gaps; they decline undocumented pieces, heavily restored pieces, and duplicates of what they hold. What they decline can go to a school, a club or a sale — ask them to say which.

4. Legality: they will ask about land status (federal-land vertebrates cannot be donated to a museum by a private person — they were never yours), about export-restricted countries, and about CITES material. A clean record answers this in one page; a muddled one ends the conversation.

5. Paperwork: the museum issues a deed of gift transferring title unconditionally. Conditions (“must be displayed”, “must stay together”) are almost always refused. In the US a donation of property is deductible at fair market value; above $5,000 the IRS requires a qualified appraisal (Form 8283) from an appraiser who is not the museum, and the museum signs the form but does not value the gift.

6. Deliver with the data: the catalogue export, the labels with the specimens, the photographs, and the collection statement. Ask for the museum's accession numbers in return and record them — “now NHMUK PV R 12345” on your record is the end of the provenance chain.

7. Do this while you can still answer questions. A curator who can phone the collector accepts more than one who receives boxes from an executor.

Sources

Cite this article

Stratum Study. "Donate a collection to a museum" (How-to). Stratum Study pack 2026.09, as of 2026-09-16. https://stratum.black/study/how-to/donate-a-collection-to-a-museum. Accessed 2026-09-20.

BibTeX · CSL-JSON

@misc{stratum-donate-a-collection-to-a-museum,
  title        = {Donate a collection to a museum},
  author       = {{Stratum Study}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://stratum.black/study/how-to/donate-a-collection-to-a-museum}},
  year         = {2026},
  note         = {How-to article, Stratum Study pack 2026.09, as of 2026-09-16; sources: stratum. Accessed 2026-09-20.}
}

Citations carry the pack version and the article's as-of date so they resolve to the same text later. The facts themselves belong to the sources listed below; cite those for the science.