[asperous]

> estimated 2.4 million items

That's 5 years if one person worked on it nonstop without sleeping and each item took 60 seconds.

I would assume they probably sit in a secure location and items on display or items leaving/transferred are catalogued first so there's bit of a triage and backlog.

Museums probably don't want to turn down valuable item donations even if they don't have the resources to catalogue if right away.

[nickff]

British Museum seems to have about 439 employees who work on "care, research, and conservation", of a total of around a thousand employees. Seems like they have enough budget and staff to get such a high-priority task done.

https://www.britishmuseum.org/sites/default/files/2023-07/br...

[Archelaos]

> and each item took 60 seconds

The required time depends on a lot of things, such as on the target quality of the data record, the complexity and fragility of the item, etc. The primary purpose of a catalogue is not to prevent theft, but to provide a tool for research. Therefore you typically want high quality photos, ideally from different sides, angels and lighting (or even a 3D scan), a description of the item, its provenance, its treatment, keywords from a normalised vocabulary, a bibliography, etc.

Here is a random example from the British Museum catalogue: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/G_1896-0201-... -- Just think yourself how long it would take you to compile all this information. I would estimate several hours, if not days.

Following the theft, the British Museum announced a plan for a quick inventory of 2,400,000 items in 5 years for £10m.[1] This means £4.17 per item. If we use the UK adult minimum wage of £11.44 as a lower bound, this yields an upper bound of 2.74 items per hour -- in other words: not more than aprox. 22 minutes per record (but probably a lot less, depending on the wages of the people involved). Such a tight budget does not seem like it would allow for anything useful to be compiled for research. It sounds more like a big waste of money.

[1] https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/10/19/british-museum-to...

[shanemhansen]

This seems like a reasonable use of resources and time? I'm assuming the British Museum has been around a bit longer than 5 years and hopefully plans on being around longer than 5 years.

Maybe than can hire a couple people. [edit] removed inflammatory last sentence.

[londons_explore]

> That's 5 years if one person worked on it nonstop without sleeping and each item took 60 seconds.

Or... 2 people doing regular working hours for 3 years taking 10 seconds per item.

Each item can literally be 'photo' + drawer/cabinet number. All other details can be crowdsourced or done later.

How long does it take to take a photo?

[PeterisP]

That's not cataloguing, that's recording, and as far as I understand this is long ago done - cataloguing is those "all other details" which require expertise and time; all the things like figuring out that this coin is a roman coin from 1st century, and that other coin from the same find is from another location.

[ssnistfajen]

How much time does it take to move a specific piece of artefact in/out of storage? What are the dimensions of the artefact? Are they sensitive to light? Are special equipments required to handle them? Every piece is different, not to mention the mandatory planning involved before moving every item. It's not the same as a retail store photographing their merchandise.

[clwg]

It's one-quarter of their collection, and they've had 271 years to accumulate and catalog all this material. As others have mentioned, they have enough staff.

I would assume they issue a receipt and itemize donations nowadays. I think part of it could be reluctance because not everything they have in their possession is rightfully theirs[0].

I don't know all the attributes required to properly catalog an artifact, but I imagine that advances in computer vision and translation could help tremendously.

https://www.businessinsider.com/british-empire-stole-cultura...