One issue that's been causing a little bit of friction at my museum lately is the idea of deaccessioning objects that are missing/lost. It's an acceptable deaccession criterion in our CMP, but my second-in-command and the registrar are not into it - both are antsy about the possibility of the objects being found again, and the former vehemently thinks it would be unethical to deaccession something we might theoretically want to keep in the collection if we could find it. She's a more recent grad than me and went to a more comprehensive museum studies program (and I generally have a tendency to doubt myself, lol), so my instinct is that she must be right, but in looking through the literature it seems to be an uncontroversial practice.

Just wondering if anyone has any experience with this? Is it the sort of thing that everyone agrees is possible but nobody actually does because it's dicey? I just don't see a reason to consider objects as in the collection when they've been documented as missing for 10 years.