In the first part of this pair of crazy ideas, I imagined the relocation of parts of a collection to another region ito create a new hub from which to loan objects and to redefine what “local” means. This results in shorter distances traveled, greater accessibility to the objects, and fewer resources required. For this second part, I propose a far more speculative and problematic idea which would benefit from your suggestions, so please, comment below.
The speculative concept involves only shipping objects one-way and thus cutting transportation in half. In other words, you leave your objects wherever you loan them and store the objects in the nearest storage facility that meets your standards. You dispense with the idea that they return to a “home” institution immediately. By doing this, you not only distribute the storage but also the care of the collection among various professionals until the objects ultimately return to the owner pending proximity.
I called this the “distributed loan model,” which is based around the way a blockchain “distributes” information among various nodes to make it more difficult to change and hack. Surely, Isaac Asimov would approve.
In this “distributed loan model,” objects, like a blockchain, travel only one way and remain in a nearby storage facility until called upon for another loan. Thus, collections get stored throughout the world until they get close enough to retun to their owner.
I can sense you immediately react with disbelief, unease, and maybe anger like watching the series finale of, well, any series ever, so let me list the major problems with the concept first. (As I said at the top, I recognize that it has issues and want your ideas for improving it.) What will insurers think? Where and how do we store the objects? Who will pay for storage? Who will care for the objects? Does it really reduce carbon emissions? Is the reduction in carbon emissions worth the risk of objects remaining out of our possession?
The answer to all of these questions is “maybe” and/or “I do not know.” Does that fill you with confidence? Never mind the details (said no insurer ever). Instead, let us consider, first, why we should consider this at all.
Obviously, radically reducing the amount of travel for objects forces us to take this at least half-seriously. Less travel means drastically less carbon emissions, lower costs, and less risk and damage to objects. Economic eclipse. In addition to this, it fundamentally changes the businesses and the markets that we hire to transport, store, install, and care for these objects. As a result, I prefer to ponder the ways to make this idea work instead of the ways in which it will not work; the reward is huge.
I anticipate that scattering your collection around the world makes you anxious. On the one hand, you have basically cut the risk exposure in half by cutting the travel in half; however, you cannot personally check on the state of the object after the loan. Plus, you end up with a myriad of objects in storage outside of your control. In a way, just by loaning the object, you have them “stored” outside of your control, so you already do this just not for the same duration. If you can hire a bookend courier to check it when it arrives, you can hire one to supervise its travel to storage nearby and check on it every 6 months. Once in storage, a question arises as to how we store it. Storing it outside of its crate will depend on the facility. We hire a third-party professional to supervise and help us decide what works best in the situation.
Let us talk about the facility, though. I believe that adopting at scale a procedure like this will have the largest affect on object storage. Major museums that lend to regions with facilities that do not meet their standards will either not lend or will demand that the standards rise. In theory, demand for better facilities in less populated or less wealthy areas will insist that facilities improve and the increased demand will cover the costs of installing higher standards. For institutions in major cities, storage in smaller cities may in fact cost less and provide similar care. A win.
Additionally, adopting a one-way shipping practice also makes reusable and rental crates more viable especially if storing objects outside of crates. Imagine if even half of your loans only use crates for a few days. Further, leaving objects in the less populous areas instead of bringing them back will more evenly distribute the crates around the world and make the program more efficient, will generate more demand and competition for these crates, and will make them better and more economical through that competition.
Like the facilities and crates, we will require more professionals outside of major cities to tend to the objects. We will also likely see them employ new and better tech products to use to tend to these objects for distant clients. Add RFIDs/trackers to all objects? Do the devices integrate with our databases and digital condition reports? Will we get notifications if a distant facility’s conditions fall outside of our requested parameters? These operational changes will also change the nature of or jobs. I will leave you to speculate on that…
For now, I recommend you consider all of the ideas I have proposed in Cognitive Dissonance 1, Cognitive Dissonance 2, Savings and [Decentralized] Loans, and here whenever you loan and determine what the situation best accommodates. Employing even some improves our current situation. We have lots of tools to employ and just have to use our limited budgets in new ways like an accountant cooking the books – except without the fraud.
In the end, distributing collections around the world facilitates a more universal standard of care for objects that, in turn, facilitates greater trust in others to care for them. The trust has already begun as more institutions adopt no-courier or bookend courier policies. Next, we have to develop and ultimately trust other vendors over the long term, but first, we have to tweak these procedures to make trust viable. Improvements only happen when much of the industry, its vendors, and its insurers work together to make them happen.
