Metal detectorist Andy Baines commenting on my remarks about a rare coin being flogged off instead of going to be curated in a public collection said (25 January 2014 08:28)...
would you rather it be stuffed in the back of a museum storage room with 90% of the other coins and artifacts (sic) that museum's (sic) have ?That's not an argument one would expect to hear from the "only want to add to our nation's history (not in it fer the munny)" brigade. That's a favourite coiney anti-academism argument.
Mr Baines apparently disapproves of an object going to a museum's reserve collection. There (unlike most private coin collections, to judge from the way such information is in a very short time irretrievable) the object would be properly entered in the catalogue system. It would be kept and monitored by a professional curatorial staff. Kept loose in coin case in some cupboard of an anonymous private collector (or bank vault) it would then be likely to disappear when they die. Like that coin that somehow turned up in Switzerland which only surfaced and was luckily recognized two generations later.
I wonder what the metal detectorist has against museum study collections. I wonder whether he has ever used one.
But then, I'd also like to know what suggests to him that this GOLD coin (worth ten thousand quid and one of only four known in the world), would actually be "stuffed in the back" of anywhere.
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