Walk the Egyptian rooms of any big museum and after a while you notice it. The noses are gone. Not every one, but enough of them that luck stops being a satisfying answer. Here is a seated official in dark stone, hands resting on his folded knees, heavy wig falling either side of a face that somebody worked over. The crowd moves past him without stopping. One woman has her phone out; she is photographing something else.

Deaccessioning is the formal process by which a museum, library, or archive permanently removes an object or item from its collection. It is the institutional equivalent of deciding to sell, transfer, or destroy a holding — and it is among the most contested decisions in collections management. What It Is Accession means to formally add something to a collection. Deaccession is the reverse: the institution decides that a particular item no longer serves its mission, is redundant, is too costly to preserve, or is better held elsewhere — and removes it from the permanent collection through a defined process.