I worked with the Sumter Historical Society for three years, in South Carolina. The trouble they ran into a lot was that a lot of the places they wanted to study from the Revolutionary and Civil War eras were still inhabited, sometimes by families that dated back to those time periods.

It's not like these folks were rude, but they weren't running a museum or anything (would you want people parading through your house?) so setting up access usually required some Southern charm and cookies, in equal measures.

The local historian there was very interested in architecture, so we'd go poking around in people's undercellars and look at the rammed earth construction techniques, things like that. Another historian out there was reading old family journals to look for clues to a settlement that vanished from New Mexico in the mid 1800s.

One time we were all just standing around in the person's living room, which has a collection of artifacts from the 1700s and 1800s. I'm looking around and notice that right next to me was a certificate signed by George Washington, inducting the home owner's greatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreat-grandfather into the Order of Cincinnatus, just sort of casually thumb-tacked to the wall. I mentally started flipping out, but hey, it's their house you know? They were nice enough to allow very occasional access to the place, so more power to them.

The situation has changed, but the Getty Museum used to have the best-preserved copy of Fiore Dei Liberi's medieval combat manual, and there was no way of looking at it. It had been scanned, but they were no longer selling CDs of the scans, they were not available on their website, etc.

Thankfully, they have since made scans publicly available, which are mirrored in high quality on Wiktenauer alongside translations. So, all's well that ends well, I guess.

But I really think organizations that hold valuable documents like this really need to be making scans of them available for study - especially when the scans already exist!

It's just mean to withhold them.

This can definitely be an issue sometimes. But it also opens up the philosophical question about who has the 'rights' to something. Many people are quite philanthropic and will lend institutions items for research and inspection. But on the other hand some sciency research history bods have a certain perception that they should be entitled to first choice of anything that comes up and that anything important enough should be handed over to them.

We shouldn't be too keen to paint them all with the same brush, but I think many private collectors are scumbags. They don't care about where their stuff is sourced from, they don't care about contributing to academia and public understanding of history. I think they get a sad ego boosts from chasing their Indiana Jones fantasy and are a net minus to wider society. The private collecting market is the root cause of illegal excavation, which leads to loss of context, the enrichment of criminal groups and surging production of forgeries.

Private collecting might have been justifiable in previous centuries, before publicly accessible museums came to be but times have changed. Private collectors are either ignorant of the damage they cause, directly or indirectly, or they simply don't give a fuck.

If this were not /r/askhistorians I would be employing more colourful language in this post.

Sources and further reading:

Brodie et al (2000). Stealing History: The Illicit Trade in Cultural Material. Mcdonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

Journeyman Pictures. (documentary; 2009). Blood Antiques. Highly recommended for insight into the modern antiques trade. It is well worth the renting fee. Trailer.

Holt (2003). Alexander the Great and the Mystery of the Elephant Medallions. University of California Press re the market for forged coins caused by private collectors looking to pay cash for 'antiques'.

Holt (2012). The Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan. University of California Press. See especially the introduction and other sections treating on the disappearance of key evidence in this part of the world.

I'm an architectural historian, and the majority of the things I want to get my hands on belong to private collectors aka "Homeowners." Most of the time people who own historic homes are realllllly into owning a HISTORIC home, which is actually kind of a pain in the ass, while being very helpful. They have a lot of research frequently and allow you access to their home, but they have all these ideas about the house and property ("George Washington slept here!") which generally are wrong or cannot be proved. Sometimes you prove that is not the case and they continue saying it's true, this is particularly bad with bed and breakfast type places.

The other side of it too is a lot of people are afraid what rules and laws they will have to follow for being recognized as historic home. Others don't think their house is anything more than old, they'll say yea but nothing happened here, and you have to explain you don't care about famous things, you care about the way the house was built so please let me in your basement... Which is another thing, most time time I just want to see the basement and the attic (especially if they have updated the house a lot) and those are places people are less inclined to show you. Enthusiasts have done up their living room in a 18th century style and want to show you a chair etc, but I just really want to see the joists and fireplace arches.

Funny you ask this now.

I am a curator for a historical exhibition that is to open next May, commemorating the end of WW2 and I just returned from research at a private museum and a private collector/amateur historian. Both were very helpful. The museum is a simple exhibition about a big company that was the main job creator in a small community from the 1920s to the 1990s.
Turns out they have all worker's files just lying around in boxes. Including about 150 personal files on forced labourers from Poland, Lithuania and the Soviet Union. They let me work there alone for hours, actually gave me the key to lock up when I'm done and I photographed the story of 10 forced labourers.

The other guy gave me hi-res photographs of an HJ-camp in the city our museum is situated in and showed me some artifacts he would offer me as a permanent loan. Among this a canoe local boys built out of a dropped US bomber's fuel tank. The guy has conducted hundred of oral history interviews during the last 15 years. He's still not sure if he will allow me to use some of them as listening stations in the exhibition, but will think about it.

My experience is that the hard part is finding these private collections. As soon as you get access to the people, most are happy to take part in a scholarly project. I often hear that they are flattered to be asked to take part in something so "serious" or "official".

The archives I work for has a very specific collection area and there is one big collector whose paper ephemera collection we'd loooove to get our little cotton-gloved mitts on. We keep in casual contact with him; he's directed people to donate materials to us before actually, and he's pretty friendly. Mostly we hope he will consider our humble little place for his collection's home once he passes on, though we haven't gotten to that point in discussions. In general he's a generous soul with historical information, collects out of a genuine enthusiasm for the history, and writes nice blog posts showing off his stuff. While there's no public access to the bulk of his collection, I definitely wouldn't say he's standing in the way of anyone doing history, quite the opposite.

I wish I lived somewhere where this could be an issue. An inactive historical community, nothing but the occasional historic home and a great distance from important events spells boredom for a historian like me.

Private collectors aren't necessarily any better or worse than other "agencies." As has been written, some love to help, others don't. The same can be of museum or governmental agencies. The crew of the WWII battleship USS Colorado donated a lot of materials to the State of Colorado for safe keeping a while ago, but then when they wanted access to those materials for the purpose of facilitating a book, the state denied them access.

US Park Service is famous in my (WWII Researcher) circles for denying access to archival materials.

I generally prefer things be in governmental agencies because they are typically more subject to laws that benefit the researcher, but there are also things of interest to historians and researchers that said agencies can't or aren't interested in saving, and for that private collectors can be a Godsend. It all depends on the circumstance and attitude of the collector in that case.

I love to study the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico. It was when the Pueblo Indians rose up and tossed the Spanish out of New Mexico. The big question is what is out there? No one really knows because the Pueblo elders simply will not talk about the revolt. They will not confirm or deny any artifacts they kept from the revolt, anything such as papers, clothing, helmets, what not. I would love to know what they know and what they have. My guess though, is that what documents they have would be like diaries and whatnot and not much in terms of the actual revolt itself, but day to day from the Spanish point of view. I would also like to hear the oral history of the revolt, but there has been some discussion about what is taught along the lines of Pueblo oral history. David Roberts wrote about how he wonders if it is talked about at all, the revolt, like it is forgotten among the tribes.

It is unknown how much of the story is lost to history, in battle things get destroyed. It has long been asked what did the Pueblo Indians take from the revolt that still sit in back rooms and vaults. Is it valuable or just roll calls?