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Comment by skookumchuck | Hacker News Reader

Concentrating irreplaceable artifacts in a museum just magnifies the probability of losing them all.

That's not true and what they did was probably optimal. The probability of losing the whole collection over time is the same. By spreading collections around into N locations, you would have, on average, N times more fires like this one, but fire would be engulfing a smaller collection at a time (1/N). Moreover, by having it centralized you can reduce costs, hence save money and use it to lower the risk of fire.

What they did by centralizing the collection was the best thing they could do to save it, but apparently they didn't even have money to protect a single museum from fire hazard. Spread the collection around the country and you don't even have money/people for proper maintenance and protection against theft in each individual location.

That would only be true if the risk of fire is evenly distributed, which it obviously isn't, and that a museum burning down now and then would not motivate better protections for the rest.

In any case, the strategy they chose obviously didn't work and they lost it 100%.

It probably isn’t but it’s safe to assume that this location was at least around the median in terms of fire risk (this location had probably better infrastructure than the average Brazilian city), so the fact that there might be less risky locations doesn’t change much since you’ll then have places with higher risk, where the collection will have burned down even sooner. Even if you knew the best location with the least hazard, optimally you would still want to move all collections there anyway.

The strategy didn’t work since any strategy was likely deemed for failure due lack of funding, not because it was suboptimal.

> By spreading collections around into N locations, you would have, on average, N times more fires like this one, but fire would be engulfing a smaller collection at a time (1/N)

If the likelihood of a fire starting in a non-residential building is roughly proportional to the square footage of the building, then you'd have roughly the same total number of fires across all buildings but 1/N of the collection destroyed each time.

Keeping them in lots of separate places just magnifies the probability of the public not being able to view them.

But maybe only centralize them when you can provide reasonable assurance of the safety of the items. In the meantime, place them with more secure facilities for safekeeping. I think national pride gets in the way, though.

Securing and protecting many small facilities is going to cost more than doing so for one facility and impinges on the reasons for gathering artefacts - study, education, etc..

I think the probability of public viewing is down to zero now, so that didn’t work out so well, did it?

Now it is zero though.

A single museum could be broken into many smaller buildings, with measures taken specifically to avoid spreading fires and things like earthquake damage from one building to another. Decentralization doesn't have to mean spreading things miles apart.

Exactly. If you visit Mt Vernon (Washington's home), the kitchen is in a separate building. It seems odd, until the guide tells you that kitchen fires were common, and so the kitchens were separated from the main house.

Usually the public viewing areas are limited in space. The bulk of a 20 million artefact collection would have to be kept in more recently built warehouses, possibly underground, and kept near by the main museum. In the event of a fire they can be sealed and filled with argon gas, exactly the same as any highly sensitive data centre, such as for instance, the IRS data centre, or the stock market. Funding for such things should have been a no brainer considering the high potential economic value of these objects. The Brazilian government should have thought of this building as though it's a bank, because it basically is, if you consider that the museum could have decided to, for instance, sell off most of the collection if it decided to, and have ended up well ahead of losing essentially billions of dollars.

> The bulk of a 20 million artefact collection would have to be kept in more recently built warehouses

That's not often the case. These museums were built to house these collections, and often include rooms full of drawers, compacting shelving etc with the collected objects. This incudes the basement, but not only the basement.

For example, the Natural History Museum in London has "the majority" of their 80 million specimens stored in the museum in London.

You may be able to go on a behind-the-scenes tour of your local museum.

Yes. It's convenience and cost vs risk.

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