Five reasons museums 'lose' things

We have all seen many stories in recent years about items going ‘missing’ from museum collections, tales of priceless works disappearing without a trace and countless items unaccounted for. These make for entertaining reading; everyone loves scandals and salacious mysteries of wrong doing in dark museum store rooms. But how accurate are these stories? What is really going on in museums, and what are museums doing about it?

In this online talk, Nico Tyack will share 18 years of working in museum documentation to look at how we have got into this situation. We will look at the measures museums have taken, both historically and more recently, to keep track of their collections.  The talk will draw from real stories to tease out the fact from the sensational headlines. Are museums really losing items, or is there something else going?

Nico Tyack has been working at Museums & Galleries Edinburgh as Collections Information Officer since 2010. During this time, he has built up a wealth of knowledge about the collections here, and a particular interest in how myths and legends build up during a museum's institutional history about the very collections they hold.