bdk wrote:
The duty of the auctioneer is to maximize the sale price for the owner.
True and I understand the need to do that, but I guess sometimes I hope that there are considerations other than just profit. For example, the group behind the Neil Armstrong auction "preserv[ed] and document[ed] the collection's authenticity and provenance ... so that, if needed, they can be referenced later for research", which shows a bit more of a compromise position.
[1] (See the paper "
The Trouble with Space Auctions" by Eleanor S. Armstrong and Jordan Bimm for more on this subject.) While I would still have some reservations about it, I would be much more understanding if they sold the album as one complete item.
bdk wrote:
I've liquidated an estate before and I'm still dealing with old photos.
I've been called to a number of houses in the past where an individual's parent has passed away and they're left to deal with everything they had kept over the years. The task can be overwhelming and I'm sympathetic to their situation. It often involves sorting through boxes and stacks of paper to determine what is relevant to the museum's mission (e.g. service records) and what is not (e.g. old financial statements or medical records). Also, although it hasn't really come up in the situations I've dealt with, it can be made even more difficult by the emotional connection individuals have to the person who has just died. (The flipside of this, by the way, is having to tell someone that the item they have a significant sentimental attachment to is not all that historically valuable.)
bdk wrote:
Many are of no interest to me but may be of interest to others, but who? And once I pass I'm sure my offspring will have even less interest in the subject.
I know exactly what you're talking about. There are many people who offer things to the museum because their children just don't have an interest in them any more. (That being said, I always make a point of telling them that I'm not there to take things they want to keep.)
As a matter of fact, the lack of interest by succeeding generations gives rise to an inverse situation with the large collections of aviation photographs that have built up online. Specifically, the problem is that many of them remain in copyright even after the original photographer has died and their descendants are no longer interested. This renders them essentially unusable, as it is nearly impossible to get in contact with the right person to license them. Take, for example,
RuthAS/
R. A. Schoefield. Her collection of photographs has been incredibly useful for illustrating various Wikipedia articles. However, if she is still alive, she would be 85 years old this year and the window to ask her permission for each one is rapidly closing, if it hasn't already. (As a matter of fact, a large number of her photographs were
almost deleted because of skepticism of her age.) (My suggestion to address this, for what it's worth, would be to give photographers an option to release their photographs into the public domain after a set number of years when they upload them to ABPic/Airliners.net/etc.) Some of them, such as those of
Peter R. Keating/John Stroud and
Chaz Bowyer/Chris Ellis/Philip Moyes do make to a place to be licensed and others like the
A. J. Jackson Collection end up in museums, but many of them don't.
It would be a different case if it was just an assortment of photographs that the someone collected over the years. As a matter of fact, the coin collection in the auction is an excellent example of that. Unlike the photo album, from all appearances they have no particular connection to the owner or each other aside from the fact they possessed them. That is not to say certain collections without a personal connection cannot have value. The fact that they are comprehensive or have been arranged in systematic manner can also render them valuable as a reference collection. For example, the "
Not Plane Jane" collection of propellers is an excellent example of this that has even been
recognized by NASM for its importance. On the other hand, just because an item came directly from the owners doesn't make it historically valuable. For example, the awards that every civic group a veteran speaks to bestows upon them (think "
key to the city" type stuff) are really not all that important.
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