APs also should add to their offerings by seeking help from educators and professionals. The general goal of this effort should be to increase the public interest in, understanding of, and support of paleontology. A second area discussed was the relationship between APs and museums. These groups have different and sometimes competing missions and motivations. In particular, there may be disagreement over custody of fossils or the maintenance of a collection.
Museums typically are space constrained and insist on picking and choosing what they accept.
On the other hand, donors want their collection's identity kept intact. Both groups can cite examples of specimens and information lost by the other. A potential solution to both the museum space issue and the custody of collections would be to provide a means whereby a private collection could become an auxiliary collection of a museum. The policies, standards, and guidelines for curation of the collection would be those of the parent museum. An alternative would be to certify certain private collections as repositories on the stipulation that they meet a standard set of guidelines.