Teaching sets and education kits
Updated
The most useful thing to do with the material that will never be individually catalogd.
A use for the bottom half
Every collection and every dealer's stock accumulates common, undocumented, small or damaged material.
It is not worth individual processing and it is genuinely useful: a school, a scout group or a beginner needs recognizable examples, not fine specimens.
Which turns a storage problem into a product, and clears shelf space for material that earns it.
What a kit needs
Species that are recognizable and illustrate something: the hardness scale, the common rock types, a range of habits, the ore minerals.
Specimens robust enough to be handled by people who will handle them badly.
Consistency across kits, which is the part that makes it a product rather than a bag. If you sell twenty kits they should contain the same twenty species.
A card or a sheet naming each specimen, which is the educational content and the thing that makes it worth more than the stone.
Nothing hazardous. No asbestiform material, nothing radioactive, no arsenic or lead-bearing species, and nothing soluble. This is a kit for children to handle, and the ordinary collector's rules are not good enough for it.
Housing
Compartmented trays or boxes, numbered to the card.
Riker mounts work here, which is one of the few applications where they are the right answer: flat, robust material, displayed as a set, handled through a lid.
Rugged rather than archival. These are going to be dropped.
The market
Schools, museums, scout and club programs, parents, and beginner collectors at shows.
It is a low-margin, low-glamour product that moves steadily, and it is the one thing in this property that behaves like ordinary retail.