Provenance, and buying an old collection

Where a specimen has been is worth money on top of where it came from, and old labels are a large part of what you buy when you buy a collection.

Provenance is a second locality

A specimen that passed through a known collection carries that history, and collectors pay for it. It evidences age, it evidences that somebody knowledgeable judged it worth keeping, and for classic localities it is often the only evidence the specimen is as old as it claims.

So the old labels are not packaging. They are part of the specimen and they travel with it.

What a chain looks like

Each holder, in order, with their own number where they used one.

Keep every original label physically, even when you make a new one. A typed modern label plus three old handwritten ones in the box is the normal and correct state of a good specimen.

Photograph them. Paper is the part of this that decays, and pyrite decay and acid vapor destroy labels faster than they destroy stone.

Buying a collection

The material and the documentation arrive together and can be separated in an afternoon by somebody tidying. Do not let that happen before you have catalogd.

Work box by box. Keep every slip with its specimen, photograph the labels before moving anything, and record the source of the collection itself as provenance for all of it.

An undocumented collection is worth buying for material and should be priced as material. A documented one is worth considerably more and the difference is entirely paper.

When the old label is wrong

It happens: species get redefined, localities get corrected, and some old identifications were always optimistic.

Do not discard or alter the old label. Add your own, stating the correction and the basis for it, and keep both.

The old label remains evidence of what the specimen was called and when. That is historical information and destroying it to tidy a record destroys more than it fixes.

References