Collection inventory check
Piece-by-piece check of a museum's or individual's collections against the inventory, whose result fixes the declared value and exposes missing works.
In France, the 2002 museum law requires Musées de France to carry out an inventory check every ten years. Each work is found, identified, compared with its entry in the register and checked for condition. For the insurer, it is the document that says which works exist and where they sit. A check always turns up gaps: objects moved without a note, works deposited at another institution and forgotten, pieces gone for decades. Each must then be classed as loss, theft or a plain recording mistake. The insurance question is direct: a work that cannot be found cannot be declared stolen without a complaint and a date, and the policy answers only to a dated event. For a private owner the exercise is the same, without a legal framework. The dated, photographed inventory is the basis of the agreed value, and the first thing the adjuster asks for after a loss. An up-to-date register also lets the owner answer the police quickly after a theft.
Textbook case: a regional museum's inventory check counts 12,400 objects and fails to find 87 entered since 1950. Among them are three eighteenth-century oils estimated at 300,000 euros. The museum files a complaint, registers them on the stolen-goods file and makes no claim to the insurer for want of a date.
collections audit, collection inventory, registrar's audit, decennial inventory check
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