As has been argued here, the accumulating data bank in the form of curated collections should be considered explicitly in such planning efforts. Developing plans to manage better what is curated will require coordination between those Federal and State agencies charged with making decisions about which sites are to be excavated, the archeologists who make and use the collections, the public and private repositories that ultimately curate the collected materials, and Native American tribes whose cultural heritage may be represented in the collections. The best coordination of regional planning efforts may be initiated by statewide, archeological professional organizations working in conjunction with State Historic Preservation Offices. Task forces that bring together the repositories and archeologists having long-term research and collecting interests in specific regions would be one means of accomplishing this synthesis. The repositories should solicit Native American involvement.
Many museums now have or are in the process of forming Native American advisory groups.
Representatives of Federal programs having major influence in the regions also should be included. For example, if the Forest Service, NPS, or Bureau of Land Management have major land holdings in a region, input from these agencies is necessary for coordination with their cultural resource management master plans. Such regional task forces may prove of benefit to collections policies in general, as a wider constituency becomes aware of and involved with collections issues. A major goal of such regional task forces would be to work with the repositories to draft collections management policies that could be used to shape the sample of the archeological record that will come to be contained in curated collections. In some cases, inter-institutional agreements may have to be made where there is overlap in the geographic areas covered by two or more museums.