0.7 Chapter five: new initiatives and economic shocks, 1982-1987  (Page 10/18)

• The museum shop. Consultants had recommended enlarging the floor area of the store to increase revenues. Work on the shop had not yet been completed.
• Capital campaign. Trustees and members of the staff of Marts&Lundy went over lists of people to determine who should be interviewed for the feasibil­ity study. It was expected that the study would be completed by January 1985 (as mentioned, it was not finished until April).
• Planned giving. A trustee had paid the fees for the Society's director of devel­opment and her assistant to attend a seminar conducted by John Brown, a consultant with expertise on planned giving programs that had been success­fully used at colleges and universities. No planned giving program had beenimplemented.
• Benefits and entertainment. Two events were scheduled for 1986.
• Corporate giving. The society was awaiting the results of the Marts&Lundy study.
• Membership. The director of development was conducting a study of the Society's membership goals for the next six, twelve, and eighteen months.
• Public relations. Five public relations firms had been interviewed to determine what they might do to bring the Society's collections before the public eye. The committee warned the Society that it should move slowly on this front, as retaining these firms would cost between $30,000 and $I00,000 annually.

The relevance and likely value of the various consultants' reports, board re­structurings, and staff studies were debatable, especially in light of their cost. Fees paid to consultants amounted to approximately $1.6 million during this period, and that figure does not include the opportunity costs of staff time spent on stud­ies and board time spent on by-laws changes. Still, one consultant's study did prove to have a material impact on the Society.

In the summer of 1985, Dr. Bryant C. Tolles, director of museum studies at the University of Delaware, was hired to "make a comprehensive analysis of and report on the society's museum, library, publications, public programming, and education functions." Because of his background, Tolles directed his study toward the care, development, and use of the Society's collections, including their man­agement, conservation, storage, exhibition, and interpretation.

Tolles's report, completed in April 1986, was highly critical of the Society, especially regarding off-site storage of the art collections. In the report, Tolles wrote, "Some particularly fine works of art and historical artifacts are being exposed to an injurious storage environment, and in fact appear to be beyond hope of restoration. ... I can emphatically and succinctly state that the conditions at the rented warehouse in Paterson [New Jersey] are the most blatantly shocking that I have observed during my entire museum career."

In addition to its criticism of the Society's art storage facilities, the Tolles report also outlined numerous other areas in need of attention. In fact, although Tolles clearly recognized the serious implications of invading the endowment and the alarming deficits, his report seemed to separate the Society's extensive physi­cal, personnel, and programmatic shortcomings from their financial implications. In the end, Tolles recommended more than twenty additional positions, ranging from new curators for decorative arts, paper, photos, and prints to new librari­ans for architecture and maps, along with numerous support staff positions. Pro­gram expansions proposed by Tolles included reviving undergraduate and graduate internship programs, expanded publications, extensive public relations campaigns, and the introduction of "hands-on" interactive devices in exhibits, among many others. The costs to fund these new initiatives would be above and beyond the extensive and urgent costs of improved facilities, storage, and security.