‘But what exactly is it that has gone wrong at the British Museum?
Earlier, he rightly suggested that the need for “investment in collection records” forms an important part of the context.
If you pay a visit to the British Museum’s Collections Online, the urgency and scale of this need is quickly confirmed.
The museum’s web pages state that “only half of the collection” has been added to the database. In other words, perhaps 4.5 million objects are recorded on “more than 2 million records” from what the official museum fact sheet describes as “at least 8 million objects”.
The sustained vagueness of these round numbers is a reminder of how, for the past generation or two, the strategic priorities of the British Museum’s leadership have been on temporary exhibitions rather than on achieving basic standards of documentation for the 99% of the collections that are not on display at any one time.
An accurate, comprehensive and publicly-accessible database would have made these thefts impossible to conceal. In this perfect storm, there is a risk that some will try to write off as a ‘bad apple’ story or an unexpected crisis what was in reality a highly predictable failure that unfolded on the watch of the senior leadership team and the trustee body, for both of whom serious questions remain.’
