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September 13, 2000 Special report

CONTENTS:

Over one million objects missing in Netherlands museums

source: Dagblad Trouw, http://www.trouw.nl
According to a survey performed by the Netherlands newspaper Dagbld Trouw some 1.3 million objects are missing from the 19 national museums in The Netherlands (Rijksmuseums. These museums have all been privatized between 1990 and 1995).

Objects have been misplaced, stolen, or loan agreements are missing. The anthropological museum in Leiden (Museum voor Volkenkunde) appears to thoroughly neglect the national cultural property. Almost half of all objects cannot be found at the place where they should be according the museum's registration 'system'.
General director S.B.Engelsman is not surprised about this outcome. The theft of a large number of objects had already been reported 1996. "In total we are missing 26.000 objects, some 12.000 of which seem to be stolen. In the mean time our registration is in good order, and at the moment we are able to track all registered objects."

Trouw analyzed the data in over 50 inspection reports composed by the Culural Property Inspection (Inspectie Cultuurbezit) since 1994. These reports are all related to the privatized national museums. The reports are public but the dissemination is very limited. Trouw needed an appeal on related legislation to be allowed access to the reports. Of some reports only a few copies exist and those were stored in a vault.

Thanks to the system of random checks used by the Cultural Property Inpsection it was possible to compose an average per museum over a number of years. Apparently the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is the best managed museum. The open air museum in Arnheim shows the worst results. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam -with an annual governmental endowment of some 35.000.000 Dutch guilders ($. 16.000.000) the richest supported museum- reaches place ten on the scale.

The Cultural property Inspection started it's surveys 1994 with the intention to create annual reports about all former state owned museums. This intention never became reality. In 5 years some 95 reports should have been composed. However only 50 were made. Museum Huis Doorn -of which recently was decided to close it down- only once out of 5 years was visited by the Inspection.