Visitor Attitudes to Deaccessioning in Italian Public Museums: An Econometric Analysis

Deaccessioning is a largely controversial practice involving the sale or disposal of objects from a museum’s collection. Although it has received increasing attention in the past few decades as a solution to museums’ financial concerns, its implications have rarely been researched in academia which is mainly due to the ‘barely legal’ status of deaccessioning as a management practice. Previous research suggests that visitors’ responses may vary depending on some factors, such as the destination of income generated by deaccessioning operations and the public’s perception of the museum collection as a public good. We address this question by analysing visitors’ responses in Italian public museums. Specifically, we hypothesize that stronger public cultural identity of the collection and the purpose of the income generated by deaccessioning strongly affect the attitudes to deaccessioning. Using structural equation modelling, we estimate several important determinants of visitors’ responses. We also show that attitudes to deaccessioning do not influence the decision to visit a museum. The findings of the article have implications for museum governance and particularly for the knowledge about deaccessioning in cultural economics and museum management.