Costs
What bad museum trips cost, in hours and in dollars
What museum trips cost when they go wrong: wasted drives, unconfirmed hours, repeat visits, and the paper damage that keeps charging you after you get home.
Museum trips carry wildly uneven prices. A wrong turn costs an hour, a locked door costs a day, and bad storage of material after you get home can cost something that cannot be bought back at any price.
Ranking these costs is the fastest way to decide which checks are worth the trouble. The figures below are going rates in the United States, and they vary by city and by season.
Adult tickets at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago run about $30 to $32; the Smithsonian museums in Washington are free. Downtown parking commonly costs $10 to $30 for a few hours, and private conservators typically charge $75 to $150 an hour.
What to take away
- The expensive mistakes happen before departure and after return, not during.
- A locked door costs a day; a missing reference number costs a second trip of $40 to $95.
- Damp material has a forty-eight hour clock, and freezing stops it.
- Mold does not die when it dries out; it goes dormant and waits.
Pricing the common errors
The errors below bite hardest at small, single-subject museums. A split site, a research room that opens by appointment, hours that change with the season — a volunteer-run collection is less likely than a flagship to post any of it, and the person who answers the phone is usually the person who runs the place. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and the SPAM Museum in Austin, Minnesota all reward a two-minute call more than any flagship does.
Museum mistakes and rough costs
Mistake
- Wrong building on split site
- One to two hours
- No specific question prepared
- Half the visit value
- Missing reference numbers
- A repeat visit
- Unconfirmed hours
- A full day plus fuel
- Booking travel before access
- The whole trip
- Mishandling material carried home
- Sometimes everything
Rough cost
- Wrong building on split site
- No specific question prepared
- Missing reference numbers
- Unconfirmed hours
- Booking travel before access
- Mishandling material carried home
| Mistake | Typical cost |
|---|---|
| Wrong building on a split-site institution | One to two hours, plus $10 to $30 in parking or fares paid twice |
| No specific question prepared | About half the visit, or $15 to $18 of a $30 to $35 ticket |
| Missing reference numbers | A repeat visit months later: $30 to $35 admission plus $20 to $60 travel |
| Unconfirmed hours | A full day, plus $10 to $14 of fuel for a 100-mile round trip |
| Booking travel before access | The whole trip: $200 to $600 in flights, $120 to $250 a night |
| Mishandling material you carried home | $75 to $150 an hour for conservation, or everything |
The mistake that follows you home
Museum trips do not end at the exit. Souvenir paper, a pamphlet from the docent's table, a box of family letters left in the car — paper comes home from a small museum, and damp paper starts a clock. Material that arrives damp, dirty or moldy and gets put somewhere warm to dry out is the part of a bad trip that keeps charging, which is why many small museums will not take in damp papers at all.
Water damage has a clock. The National Archives sets out the response on its page about wet records, which covers emergency salvage. Many materials air dry acceptably if minor distortion is tolerable. Small quantities can be spread on clean blotting material in a cool, dry place with plenty of air circulation, and wet boxes should be lined with thin plastic bags.
Supplies are cheap next to treatment. Archival blotting paper typically costs $10 to $25 a pad, and unprinted newsprint is less, though it has to be changed as it soaks.
High heat or harsh sunlight dries things quickly and causes permanent damage. Quantities too large to handle within the first forty-eight hours should be frozen, either for later drying or for referral to a professional.
A freezer you already own costs nothing extra. A small chest freezer runs about $150 to $300, which is under two hours of a conservator's time at $75 to $150 an hour.
Mold is the one that keeps costing
Drying does not solve mold; it postpones it. The National Archives page about dealing with mold explains that mold grows where temperature and humidity are high and air circulation is low.
Moldy material should be isolated in a cool, dry place with good airflow and not returned until the conditions behind the growth are fixed. Once the substrate dries, the mold turns dormant and powdery and can be gently brushed off.
The warning is the important part. Dormant mold grows again whenever conditions allow, so removal should happen outdoors or into a vacuum with a filter that can retain the spores. An ordinary vacuum recirculates them back into the room.
A vacuum that traps spores typically sells for $150 to $400. A conservator's assessment usually starts at $100 to $300 before any treatment, and full remediation of a household collection often runs $500 to several thousand dollars. The American Institute for Conservation keeps a Find a Conservator directory for locating a conservator who works on paper.
Mold is the failure mode that ends collections. A conservation invoice is the cheaper outcome.
The checks worth their time
- Phone to confirm hours. Costs two minutes, saves a day and $10 to $30 in parking or fares.
- Write one specific question. Costs ten minutes, doubles the value of a $30 to $35 ticket.
- Record every reference. Costs seconds each, saves a repeat trip worth $40 to $95.
- Deal with damp material within forty-eight hours. Costs an evening, saves the material. Conservation of one water-damaged document typically starts at $100 and can pass $500.
Small, single-subject museums often run on volunteers who answer the phone themselves, so the two-minute call is the cheapest part of any museum trip — and the four checks above are the whole list.
