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projected through the middle of the next decade.  An amount of $325,000 is requested in the FY 1978 budget to initiate architectural and engineering planning for a Museum Support Center.  The balance of the planning funds, estimated at $575,000, and construction and equipping funds, estimated at $20,600,000, will be sought by fiscal year 1980.  Legislation authorizing construction should be introduced early in the 95th Congress.

[[underline]]The Reason for Collections and Their Growth[[/underline]]

Collections of original objects in the fields of science, history, and art are required for use in the identification of similar or related objects, research, education, and exhibitions or simply for aesthetic enjoyment and patriotic inspiration.  Their importance spans such activities as the application of collection-based entomological research for the control of insects, the study of human disease in ancient anthropological materials, and historical understanding of technological and engineering developments, and the pleasure a viewer experiences in the presence of a master work of art.  In these contexts nothing can take the place of the original object or specimen.

Museums and museum collections must and should grow.  Day-to-day history, the practice of the arts, and new technologies are relentless generators of objects to be preserved, exhibited, studied, and interpreted.  Archaeologists discover, collect, and preserve the evidence of new knowledge of the past.  Ethnologists