As a result of appearing on Newsnight to discuss some if the issues surrounding the thefts at the British Museum, I have, perhaps not surprisingly, got interested in what, and how, things went wrong.

One issue which has not so far been mentioned, partly because the news coverage is not very analytical, is what went wrong with the procedures of audit. The British Museum is not a private institution, but is still, to a significant extent, state funded. As a result, it will have been subject to very regular processes of internal and external audit which will inevitably have covered issues of security and collection care on a routine basis. So, who, one wonders, has been undertaking their audit over the last fifteen years and what were their recommendations ? It used to be that the National Audit Office undertook regular reports, as they did in 1988 when they were highly critical of the V&A, which led to the establishment of computerised documentation of the collection, but much less critical of the British Museum which survived scrutiny. This was over thirty years ago in the early days of computerised collections management. It would be interesting to know what the recommendations of audit have been and whether they have been followed, because it seems a touch implausible, as has been implied in the press, that there are roughly 6 million objects still lying about in the stores which have not been properly documented in an internal inventory, not least because the online catalogue of the Department of Prints and Drawings, which I use routinely, is exemplary.