I can only talk about personal experience, as a curator in a major maritime museum - for three years, a long time ago (1980-1983).
To begin with, I wish the phrase "museum quality model" would vanish from the language. It means absolutely nothing. Some of the lousiest - and some of the best - models I've ever seen have been in museums. In a sense the term is an oxymoron. "Quality," as a ship modeler usually defines it, is only one of many attributes a reputable museum considers when deciding to acquire a model.
One of those junky-looking
Santa Marias that turn up in K-Mart obviously wouldn't be a candidate for acquisition by any reputable museum. But show a museum curator a model that looks exactly like that AND can be demonstrated conclusively to have been built by one of Columbus's crewmen, and that curator will spend his year's acquisition budget to get his hands on it.
I'm afraid a lot of modelers have unrealistic perceptions about how - and how often - museums acquire ship models. The joint where I used to work had, in good years, an artifact acquisition budget of about $100,000. (In less-than-good years it sank to about $60,000. I have no idea what it is nowadays.) That money had to buy paintings, boats, ship fragments, uniforms, flags, and every other sort of object the museum collected. A really good sailing ship model - the sort that would have won a medal in the museum's competition - typically costs between $10,000 and $30,000. (That may seem like a lot, but on a per-hour basis it isn't. Such a model can take 1,000 or 3,000 hours to build. Professional scale ship modelers don't get rich.) And the prices of fine old models, such as the "Admiralty models," can go into six figures. At those rates we simply couldn't afford to buy models on a regular basis. The maritime museum cannot, unfortunately, serve the ship modeling community the way an art museum serves the painting and sculpting fields. The money just isn't there. Neither, for that matter, is the necessary space. No maritime museum has room for all the ship models it has the opportunity to acquire.
The result is that, in any reputable museum, some hard decisions have to be made. Our policy was, generally speaking, to acquire only models (and paintings) that were contemporary with the ships they represented. (Again, I should emphasize that I have no idea what that museum's policy on the matter is nowadays.) We rarely, for instance, purchased or accepted models of clipper ships built by modern modelers. That didn't imply any disapproval or deprecation of them; we simply had to stretch the available space and funds as far as we could. We did make exceptions - the most well-known ones being the Crabtree collection and Harold Hahn's colonial shipyard diorama. I pursuaded my boss to bend the rules in the case of models built by outstanding, influential modelers whose work, in my judgment, rose to the level of art. That's how I was able to justify buying a model by Donald McNarry. (I was working on a Harold Underhill, but it got away from me.) But those were exceptions. During the three years I worked there, as I remember, the museum acquired a dozen or so models.
It sounds like the museum where Schoonerbum works is approaching the problem a little differently than we did - and that's fine. But good ones do operate according to some basic precepts of the profession. I'll take the liberty of suggesting, first, one of the most basic points I make in the museum studies course I teach: there needs to be a collection policy. Somebody needs to sit down and work out a logical, practical philosophy about what artifacts should be acquired, and that policy needs to be WRITTEN DOWN - and the museum needs to stick to it. It sounds like that may be what's going on at the moment.
The ship model is, by the definitions normally employed in museums, an unusual object in that it performs several distinct functions - sometimes simultaneously. It can be an artifact in the most traditional sense. (Example: a POW bone model from the Napoleonic Wars, or a nineteenth-century sailor-made model.) It can be an exhibit device. (Example: a modern model of the
Titanic, intended primarily to show the visitor what the real ship - which is not available - looked like.) It can be the end product of a scholarly research project. (Example: the model of the frigate
Essex in the Peabody-Essex Museum, or the merchantman
Betsy in the underwater archaeology exhibition at the Yorktown Victory Center.) Or it can be viewed as a work of art, exhibited to the public for the same reason (albeit perhaps on a slightly lower plane) as a Picasso painting or a Rodin sculpture. (Example: the Crabtree models.) Sometimes the lines between those functions are blurry, but I sugget that the museum professional think about those functions carefully when looking over a model.
Anybody who's managed to stomach my ridicuously boring posts in this forum knows that I believe in kits. Schoonerbum's point about a plastic kit doing a perfectly satisfactory job of showing what a warship looked like is well-taken. In my personal opinion, if that's the function of the model as designated by the museum - i.e., if the model is going to function as an exhibit device - the museum is totally justified in using the kit-built model.
Anybody who's at all sensitive to the concept of scale modeling knows that the modern plastic kit - airplane, car, tank, locomotive, or ship - does a better job of representing the real thing than the vast majority of scratchbuilt models, and does it cheaper. (Would anybody seriously suggest that a military museum commission a scratchbuilt model of a Sherman tank on 1/35 scale, on the grounds that the Tamiya kit isn't good enough?) Things start getting tricky, though, when the curator has to choose between a beautifully-done
Bismarck built from the Tamiya kit and a crude one built in 1941 by a sailor in the Kriegsmarine. Any curator I've ever met - including me - would pick the latter.
As to plastic sailing ships - in my opinion a
Victory built from the Heller kit, skillfully and with a considerable amount of detail added or replaced, would do a fine job of showing the public what the real ship looked like. Would it constitute as great an example of craftsmanship as Longridge's model in the Science Museum? Of course not. But if it serves the function the museum has in mind for it, and if it gives the museum the opportunity to stretch the budget a bit, why not acquire it? The kit-built models I'd exclude from my own personal museum (here comes another rant) would be those Continental European plank-on-bulkhead...things. Most of them, unless they're modified almost beyond recognition, don't produce scale models.
None of this provides a straightforward answer to Schoonerbum's basic question. In my opinion there is no straightforward answer to it. (That's another thing I tell my students: beware of anybody who says the theoretical problems of running a museum have simple, universal solutions.) The best suggestion I can offer is to (1) educate the people in charge of the museum as to what scale modeling is, (2) formulate a collections policy, and (3) get some knowledgeable, competent people to carry it out.
Hope that helps a little. Good luck.