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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 7298628, member: 66&quot;]The problem is no museum can possibly display everything they have.&nbsp; They just don&#039;t have the room.&nbsp; What gets displayed are those items that have the most popular interest even if they aren&#039;t the most important.&nbsp; And displays are occasionally changed. (But most museums are generously endowed so display changes are often infrequent.)&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>The Smithsonian&#039;s National Coin Collection contains over 1.5 million items.&nbsp; How much space would it take to display all of it?&nbsp; And that is just one of their collections.&nbsp; They have MANY other collections that would also take up huge amounts of space to display everything.&nbsp; So probably 99+% of the material they have is in storage.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Then there is the fact that a lot of donated material probably duplicate material they already have.&nbsp; So then they have the choice they can sell it or donate it to another museum that doesn&#039;t have it.&nbsp; Some stuff they will keep duplicates of&nbsp; but eventually they just have enough.</p><p><br /></p><p>And finally there is the problem that in some cases, unfortunately, material does &quot;walk out&quot; the back door.&nbsp; Have some valuable coins that have not been on display for 50 years and no one has even looked at them for 30 years, there is a good chance no one is going to go look for them for another 20 years or more.&nbsp; They make a tempting target for some people because they know it will be a long time before they are ever missed and probably not until long after the person who takes them is gone.&nbsp; Stuff like that does sometimes &quot;evaporate&quot;.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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