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> 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... |