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Message:: [QUOTE="kaparthy, post: 3290024, member: 57463"]Tell you what, go to any ANA convention and look at the Exhibits. Then go back to any museum and read the paltry little note cards next to the displays. We put far more effort into educating the public in one corner of a show hall than most museums do in all of their galleries combined (some exceptions). Moreover, when it comes to coins, museums often display fakes.  They make casts and electrotypes rather than putting the actual coins out. Well, OK, maybe it is a security feature. But do they make prints of their Picassos, Renoirs, and Raphaels and put those in frames instead of the real thing? Most museums have little regard for numismatics. They do not understand money as semata. My first clue was when I started in numismatics about 1993. Interested in ancients, I was researching the town of Cyrene. I found a big book of excavation reports from the University of Michigan. Very nice. Except that one of the photographs showed the hands of a guy cleaning a coin with a pocketknife. "Hey, that Degas is looking a little dusty, get some Comet and scrub it down!"  (I kid you not: Read about how the British Museum used an acid wash on the Elgin Marbles.)[/QUOTE]