Where destructive sampling of museum natural history collections is proposed, the needs of current research must be balanced against preservation for future use of a finite resource. This paper presents a case study of an interaction between researchers at the University of York and curators at York Museums Trust (YMT) regarding a request by the former for destructive sampling from YMT's historic bird egg collection. We draw attention to reasons for success and share an approach to managing a destructive sampling request in a regional museum useful to both researchers (in preparing requests) and curators (in assessing and acting upon these).
