A New Fee Structure to Ensure Repository and Archive Sustainability

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Navigating Ethical and Legal Quandaries in Modern Archaeological Curation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For many decades, the Arizona State Museum (ASM) used a flat-rate curation model that proved unsustainable. It did not cover the costs of reviewing incoming materials for compliance with the Arizona Antiquities Act (AAA), preparing submissions for curation, or care in perpetuity. Furthermore, inadequate funding resulted in a storage space crisis and an intimidatingly large processing backlog, undercutting ASM's ability to meet its legal responsibilities and comply with ethical standards. An amendment to Arizona Revised Statutes § 15-1631 in 2016 required ASM to develop a new fee structure that would recover all costs and ensure ASM's ability to curate collections that, by state law, are in its care. The new fee structure, an effort-based model, coupled with an interest-bearing account designed to cover in-perpetuity curation costs, has been in effect for more than a year. In this paper, we discuss two ASM offices, the Archaeological Records Office and the Archaeological Repository, as case studies, describing for each: (1) the new fee structure in place; (2) the way the fee structure has been implemented; (3) the reverberating effects of this new, effort-based approach to curation at ASM; and (4) the efficacy of the new model for in-perpetuity curation and AAA compliance.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Navigating Ethical and Legal Quandaries in Modern Archaeological Curation   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 31995