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We are a social history museum. Our collecting policy encompasses any clothing made or worn locally. Eating up our limited storage space is a large, and growing, collection of clothes that tend to be wedding dresses and other clothes for special occasions.

They were all locally made or worn but few are distinctively local in character or representative of what people here have worn in everyday life. I would very much like to suggest changes that would make our collecting policy more selective. However, I have only been in the post for a year and am apprehensive about approaching my manager or 'rocking the boat'. Any thoughts?

Approach your manager in the knowledge that this may well be an issue he or she is aware of and would welcome your thoughts on. Certainly the issue should be one which colleagues, irrespective of their length of service or status within the organisational structure of the museum, should feel free to discuss openly. It would, in fact, be short-sighted both professionally and ethically for managers not to encourage such discussion.

Collecting policies should never be immutable. If, in the case of your museum, they result in the accumulation of material unrepresentative of the life of the community the museum serves, they should be revised. The result of passive collecting, just taking in whatever happens to be donated, is that many museums with collections of clothing have a paucity of everyday, occupational clothing and a surfeit of 'Sunday best'.

In these cases a more proactive approach, actively collecting to plug gaps in collections that make them unrepresentative, is to be encouraged. How many museums do enough to collect ethnic minority clothing, the clothing worn by new age travellers, clubwear, overalls, replica football kits, and school uniforms?