Hasta La Ideas

The University College London’s museums are purging most of their 250,000 items in their collection. They plan to donate a good portion of it to other museums, but they might also trash the objects not worth keeping.

To decide which objects to keep and which objects to purge, the museum is asking the public to weigh in on the process.

From a Time magazine article about the purge:

Consider the boring old picnic basket known as the “Agatha Christie basket,” which contains fragments of pottery of unknown origins. If it had belonged to the author, as its nickname would suggest, it would undoubtedly be a keeper; however, it turns out it belonged to her second husband’s second wife, and the university has no idea under what circumstances it was donated. Or what about a giant rhinoceros skull? Is that worth keeping? How about the samples of earth dug up from the English Channel, pre-Chunnel? Hundreds of beautiful hand-drawn lecture slides made by the scientist Sir Ambrose Fleming, inventor of the diode? Or the slides of microscopic fossils, which don’t seem to take up much space until you consider there’s a quarter million of them in storage?

Last month, the university put these items and many more together as part of an exhibition called Disposal? Visitors were asked which artifacts they’d pitch, and, more vitally, for what reasons. The collections reviewers are now poring through hundreds of visitor feedback forms to learn how the public would go about thinning the university’s collections. Armed with that information, they’ll soon start the lengthy process of deciding what will stay or go. (The Agatha Christie basket should get a reprieve — officials admit they’ve grown quite fond of it.)

Applying a similar process to items in your home and office would be a fun way to decide what to keep and what to purge. Throw a small party, display the items in question, set out response cards and pens, and let your friends tell you what they really think of your stuff. Uncluttering doesn’t have to be boring — keep it fun and follow the lead of UCL’s museums.