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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

My mums incomplete thesis in the 70s required access to some letters and she had manuscript hand written notes from John Ruskin amongst others (iron and gall ink destroys paper. The words etch out black rimmed ghosts).

We returned them to the library after she died in the 90s. This happens without any conscious effort if you file by the volcano method and she had at least two part-time jobs on the go to her dying days, filled with academic paperwork. She had two studies overflowing with books, slides, notes, pictures. You literally had to climb over the piles.

The miracle was finding the letters frankly. They could easily have been mistaken for ephemera and destroyed.

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Yeah, my best guess is that this is something similar - past academic or librarian decided to take them home for reasons known only to them, and after their death, their embarrassed children, fortunately realising their importance, anonymously returned them.

I’ve witnessed similar - elderly neighbour had a set of drawings by Wren that he’d sneak out to show you, but was evasive about their provenance. Turns out the old dog had nicked them when he was renovating a local museum in the 60’s. He had his brother return them after he died. Funny thing is, the museum never even knew they’d had them to go missing, so they proudly tooted about their new Wren sketches donated by an anonymous benefactor.

From a PR angle "donations by anonymous benefactor" sounds a lot better than "we lost invaluable items and didn't even notice"

> the museum never even knew they’d had them to go missing

This is increasingly a problem for museums and libraries all over the world. They keep accreting material but their exhibit space is often shrinking, or badly maintained. Security is mostly an afterthought, ungodly amounts of precious artefacts disappear without people realizing for years. This is particularly bad in Europe, where museums are centuries old at this point and often overflow with material.

The solution is probably to somehow link artefacts to RFID tags or similar, or enclose them in boxes with such features, which can be monitored automatically. It's obviously a challenge (you can't just place a sticker on the Gioconda, but if you make it too easy to non-destructively remove it, it's self-defeating; and they already take years to just build their inventories, let alone secure each individual item).

Do you have any sources for your claims?

Because, having worked in this space for many year, your statements could be read as a generalization, whereas things are far more nuanced, context-dependent and in many cases quite the opposite from what you're saying here.

It's true that heritage institutions face challenges. But that's true for any field endeavor. Moreover, this field is very much aware of the challenges regarding acquisition, preservation, curation, accessibility, exhibiting, loans, security, indemnity, knowledge sharing, restoration, registration, cataloguing, etc. etc. The logistics are well understood and the expertise is there.

Often enough, a big issue is funding in order to invest in adequate staff and staffing.

Frankly, the perception of the "stuffy, old, badly managed" institute that your comment perpetuates here is harmful in that regard. The core mission of the heritage industry is to serve as a collective memory for local, regional and national communities. Heritage serves as the ground in which collective identities are rooted. The vast majority of experts are well aware of the importance of their work regarding the public's historic awareness.

However, in order to be able to sustain that mission, support from policy makers and other backers is sorely needed. Dismissing the challenges heritage institutions as a result of their own perceived ineptness achieves the exact opposite: the preservation of heritage and the remembrance of the past for future generations only getting a low priority, and therefor not receiving the funding it needs.

While technology assists the heritage industry greatly, integration in these complex institutions which house tens thousands - in many cases hundreds of thousands - of fragile and brittle objects, specimens and items is far from trivial and often spans multiple years of hard labor.

The Cambridge University Library, in this case, dates back to the early 15h century and contains approximately 9 million items. That's a reflection of how long the library exists, as well as a reflection of the sum of knowledge it has accrued over centuries, and how it serves a memory institution. Sustaining such a setting implies developing a vision which surpasses the lifespan of its own employees.

In that regard, linking artifacts with RFID tags, sounds like a nice idea, but isn't something one simply does, assuming it as a definitive solution regarding security or preservation.

We often read of archives/museums dealing with past time decisions on restoration. Attaching an RFID tag in any way shrieks of "oh, we didn't realise the adhesive did that after 50 years" problems. (which I think is contained in your last point)

Exactly.

Also, the OP refers to the Mona Lisa as an example.

Ironically, the Mona Lisa gained global fame because of its theft from the Louvre in 1911 by Vincenzo Peruggia: the very man who had helped construct the panel's glass casing.

As a patriot, Peruggia believed that the panel belonged to an Italian museum. After two years of hiding the painting in his apartment, he grew impatient. He got caught trying to sell it of to the director of the Uffizi in Florence. The Mona Lisa returned to Paris in 1914.

Given the longevity of heritage institutions, theft or objects going missing is never a question of "if it will happen", but "when it will happen". Even with the best of systems in place, you can't rule out human error, or intentions.

Finally, deaccessioning is a vital part of policies. Museums do auction off objects for various reasons e.g. because they are duplicative or not relevant or complementary anymore to the mission of the museum and its collection.

... and in some cases, they are forced to sell of objects in order to cover the bills. The Pandemic has added such pressures to many institutions, including the Met:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/arts/design/deaccession-m...

This reads like a massive excusatio non petita.

I never accused anyone of being incompetent or careless (let alone "stuffy"), but I think it's very clear that the sector is often struggling under the weight of its own size. You just have to check newspapers for the continuous stream of news about missing books and other niche artefacts, from England to Italy or anywhere really. Most losses are discovered years or decades later, which suggests there are likely many more that are simply never detected. In some cases, like the Girolamini library in Napoli, employees set up whole operations that go on for months or years. And why wouldn't they? Salaries in the sector, as I'm sure you know, are rarely spectacular.

I agree that the causes of such state of things are typically related to lack of funding and interest from the public and civic leaders. That doesn't mean it's not a problem, because very clearly it is, or we wouldn't be here. The world of museums and libraries was effectively set up in the pre-modern era, to safeguard amounts of artefacts that used to be massively smaller; since then, it has not grown anywhere near linearly, while history continues to produce larger and larger amount of items to preserve. The challenge gets harder and harder, particularly for the thousands of small institutions scattered around provincial Europe. If even almighty Cambridge, backed by the wealthiest in the nation, can't keep their artefacts safe, what hope does Bolton have?

Which is why I simply expressed the hope that, at some point, the problem can be solved with an increased amount of technology, simply because human systems, even when populated by the best of the best, just tend to fail at scale.

> like a nice idea, but isn't something one simply does

Duh. I never said otherwise, I just speculated it could be part of the solution.

Probably because of your experience, you seem to have read in my comment some sort of attack or suggestion that museum people were dumb for not slapping rfids everywhere. That was not the case. I acknowledged a challenge and discussed a possible element of the solution. That's all.

> This reads like a massive excusatio non petita.

You did post a very short take on a public forum.

> I think it's very clear that the sector is often struggling under the weight of its own size

That's an opinion.

> You just have to check newspapers for the continuous stream of news about missing books and other niche artefacts, from England to Italy or anywhere real

That's anecdata at best, unless you can quantify that, qualify those perceived losses in terms of their real or perceived value, and how that relates to collection management.

> In some cases, like the Girolamini library in Napoli, employees set up whole operations that go on for months or years. Salaries in the sector, as I'm sure you know, are rarely spectacular.

The preservation of heritage is a reflection of how a society perceives the value of that heritage. That's the hard part. The notion that it's possible to preserve all valuable items for centuries in top notch conditions is a pipe dream. The reality is that preservation and valorization of heritage is - ultimately - tied into a social, economic, political, cultural even religious context. And that context shifts constantly.

What happened in Italy is a disgrace. It happened as a result of defunding and lack of oversight. The italian state isn't a rich nation. It suffers massive debts, it's politics are turbulent and law enforcement is a huge challenge. At the same time, it's not an unique situation is this also happens in other countries where state actors aren't in a position to safeguard heritage properly.

> The challenge gets harder and harder, particularly for the thousands of small institutions scattered around provincial Europe.

See: above. For all the perceived stability of European nations, fact is that public actors in Europe suffer just the same effects of macro-economic, social and political dynamics as elsewhere. Small institutions don't struggle because of their own doing. They struggle because public budgets have been slashed over the past decades, over and over again.

> while history continues to produce larger and larger amount of items to preserve.

Again, that's where curation comes into play. Also, do you really believe that the items and artefacts stored in Cambridge constitute the bulk of cultural production over the past millennium? Reality is far more prozaic: it's a certainty that lots of items and objects we don't even know they ever existed have gone lost to time.

It's also pretty much par for the course that recent times will yield far larger volume of items. Not everything can, will or even should be preserved. Loss is inevitable. That's not an admission to stop trying, rather it's an acknowledgement that institutions can only operate on their mission within the bounds of the resources they have at their disposal.

And yes, that might entail acknowledging that there's a chance items of a massive collection might go missing with no-one readily noticing immediately.

It's also why insurance is a huge and fraught topic in the heritage industry.

> Which is why I simply expressed the hope that, at some point, the problem can be solved with an increased amount of technology, simply because human systems, even when populated by the best of the best, just tend to fail at scale.

Digitization has it's uses. Undeniable. But the reality is that registration and cataloguing is an arduous task that can't be automated. It's also a very expensive task since you need qualified domain experts to do it correctly / properly.

Technology can assist us, but it can never replace human labor in this process of preservation.

> if you file by the volcano method

Is this an organizational methodology?

i think it refers to a disorganized "whatever you worked on last is on top of the pile" methodology.

It's a joke as disorganized people like me tend to have piles of crap that form chronological geologic strata of paper and projects.

I am stunned by the lack of good google matches to what I assumed was a well understood academic humour reference. My entire belief in the universality of experience is crashing down.

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