In a special event on Wednesday 19 April, hosted by The Russell Society, and chaired by myself, we will present an overview of the key factors to be considered, some of the constraints and hurdles to be overcome, as well as opportunities and threats which may confront us.

We owe it to the specimens, and to those who came before us from whom we have benefited so much, to ensure that our collections are handled in a suitably responsible and satisfactory manner, and that important pieces are curated and preserved together with as much curatorial data and specimen history as possible (and that obviously includes preservation of catalogue information).

To the Mindat and broader mineral collecting community we should ask: 

Is your collection properly labelled and organised such that someone coming to it ‘cold’ would be able to understand what is what, and to be confident in dispersing it appropriately? 

Do you have a catalogue? If so, is it on paper or in electronic form? 

If electronic, is it regularly backed-up and in a format likely to be machine readable in the future? 

Does someone else know how to access it, where to find passwords etc.? 

Do your family members understand the importance (and perhaps financial value) of your collection? 

Do they know who to contact and what to do in the event of your unexpected demise? 

Should the collection go to a museum or university (either in its entirety or segments of it)? 

Is the best route to return the specimens to the collecting fraternity via a sale or auction, or is sale to a dealer a better option?

We’ll be addressing these questions, and a whole lot more, in discussion with a panel of experts from the Natural History Museum (London), National Museum Wales, National Museums Northern Ireland, BGS, The Geological Curators’ Group and National Museums Scotland.

The event will be run on Zoom and further details will be available via The Russell society website nearer the date - see https://russellsoc.org/

To return to your original question, I think there are several layers of complexity here. 

Firstly, for historical collections now assimilated into museum collections there is an increasing trend towards making databases accessible (at least in a limited form) online. The detail available varies from institution to institution but I would cite the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, The Hunterian (Glasgow) and the Natural History Museum (London) as three good examples (check out the relevant websites).

For private collections there are clearly potential issues of confidentiality, security, financial data etc. etc., but in principle it should be possible for well-documented and curated collections to participate in such an initiative. It would be interesting to know what proportion of amateur/private collections are sufficiently well documented and curated to make preservation / publication / archiving of any catalogue worthwhile.

There is often a fair element of secrecy in private collections, people wishing to safeguard their sources, reticence about what they collected and when, how much was paid for a specimen and so on, all very understandable. In general, historical collections are probably going to be much easier to deal with because much of the 'data sensitivity' will now have faded.

There is also the question of 'intellectual property' and where institutions hold/own historical catalogues they may adopt a policy of making the documents available upon request to bona-fide researchers, but stop short of putting scans or digital versions of the whole thing online. 

It would be good to see more discussions of this sort.

Finally, to end on an upbeat note, the image at the top of this post shows one of the wonderful cases of specimens from the Ludlam Collection, formerly on display in The Geological Museum London. The accompanying guide - A Handbook to a Collection of the Minerals of the British Isles (Rudler, F.W. 1905) is an object lesson in how to document a collection for posterity. If you are not familiar with it I strongly recommend downloading a PDF copy - it is one of the finest works on British topographical mineralogy ever published 

https://www.mindat.org/book_details.php?id=42

Cheers

Roy