May 22, 2001
CONTENTS:
- Silver stolen from King of Sweden!
- French discussion or mailing lists ?
- Fwd: Open flame operations during restoration projects
- Computer Security--Your Alarm System
- Heritage museum in crisis over slump
- Russia: Germany Sees Slow Progress In Regaining Art Treasures
- Settlement may let Terra move off Michigan Avenue
From: "Gustaf-Wilhelm Hellstedt" gwh@alert-all.se
Subject: Silver stolen from King of Sweden!
On the night between the 17th and 18th of May 2001 one of the King of Sweden's palaces was burgled.
The thieves broke in by breaking a window at Ulriksdals palace. They then carried on in to the Silver room were they broke several exhibition cases and plundered them of the objects.
Ten objects are now missing from the late King Gustaf V's private collection. The objects areseveral hundred year old and dates between 1575 and 1796.
Even though the alarm went of the thieves got away. The objects are irreplaceable and invaluable but will be very hard to sell for the thieves.
Among the stolen objects is a goblet from S:t Petersburg with a medal from Katharine II's coronation, urn made in England 1675, cup of gilded silver from Moscow 1744, an Italian box with the Swedish Queen Kristina's picture and a oval sugar bowl signed Andreas Röymand, Köpenhamn 1785. The Swedish court encourage the public and dealers to be alert.
Gustaf-Wilhelm Hellstedt. E-mail: gwh@alert-all.se or gustaf@fishtank.se
From: adriaan linters alinters@conservare.be
Subject: French discussion or mailing lists ?
Do you have any idea if there are discussion or mailing groups on museums in French.
I'm now teaching conservation sciences in Arras (North of France) and when I informed my students about the well known English mailing lists most of them seemed to have problems with the English
Greetings
Adriaan Linters
http://www.conservare.be/
http://eur-heritage.com
From: Jack Watts firesafe@middlebury.net
Subject: Fwd: Open flame operations during restoration projects
tom.mcdowell@gsa.gov wrote:
Dear Friends,
Please open this link below and take a look at another historic landmark - now essentially destroyed by a fire on Tuesday of this week. The University of Kentucky Administration Building was constructed as the KY Agricultural and Mechanical College from designs by the MacDonald Brothers in 1882. The fire started as a result of construction/restoration activities - which were nearing completion. A careless mechanic with a propane torch ignited the dessicated wooden roof sheathing. Although restoration is feasible, at great expense ($15,000,000.00), considerable irreplaceable fabric was consumed by the flames - significantly diminishing the historic value of the artifact. I know that we are all familiar with many other tragedies similar to this one - let's do something about it!
Open flame activities should be banned during renovation/restoration of historic buildings.
How can we encourage this policy to be adopted and rigorously enforced?
http://architecture.uky.edu/fire/
Sincerely,
Tom McDowell
From: IntlArtCop@aol.com
Subject: Computer Security--Your Alarm System
I have a number of clients who resist my regular recommendation that they not put their alarm monitoring and access control system on the same network as their building computer system. They have been assured by the Information Technology people that the firewall will protect them. I say that even Microsoft's web site has been hacked along with that of the CIA and FBI so why do they feel that their site is so well protected. I also point out that one computer disk from home previously used to play a computer game by their teenager, infected with an "I Love You" virus, and the security system, if Windows based, is wiped out. What better way to hit a museum than to make it look like a garden variety virus and not a diversion to a break in. Even with virus protection it can happen and it happens all the time. My point is this. Last week I added a broadband connection in my office. It had not been available in my complex until now. I use cable for high speed connection and cable is "always on". That means that the back door to my computer is wide open. Even though we have a dedicated computer for internet that is does not contain other files on it and a hacker would see nothing but a few applications I use to play my music while working, i added a firewall just in case I had something on there that i just downloaded when a hacker found his way in.
Boy, did I have a revelation! In the first 48 hours that I was connected via cable, I had four hacker attempts to enter my computer. I know these things happen regularly but I had no idea they happened at this frequency. One was from South Korea, one from Australia, one from the Netherlands, and one from the U.S. The U.S. attempt was looking for an .ftp site which is hard to protect and subject to mischief, and the other three were what is called RPC attempts looking for Unix servers, because several pieces of software on Unix servers are easy to attack. My firewall successfully blocked all attempts and logged the server address of the hacker. I notified the server webmaster on three of the four but he's probably the hacker so it won't do much good. On the fourth, he had changed server addresses indicating that he probably wasn't even using that address in the first place.
Be aware that these guys have programs that allow them to sweep through the cable system checking every computer subscribed to the internet service and test to see if they could get in. Once in, they look around and take what they want or do damage.
I'm posting this because as a security professional with 31 years of experience and a pretty good grasp of computers and technical matters, I was totally unprepared for this level of attack. If your museum has a security system that shares any other network, begin to take steps to get it on its own network. If you have a modem on your security system, make sure that it is not physically connected so no one can dial in and so no one can attack you at night when your guards are surfing the net instead of working like they are supposed to be. And if you have an always-on internet connection in your office, keep in mind that someone could be looking through your files right now. Consider an external hard drive for all of your data files that can be turned off or even locked away after hours. If your alarm monitoring and access control system is capable of multi-tasking, you still should not use it as your primary office computer for word processing, scheduling, etc. as you run the risk of introducing a virus or being attacked when you are surfing the net. I know that you don't want two PC's on your desk but that may be what this requires.
My experience so far with Information Technology people is that they are reluctant to admit that this level of intrusion is possible. They don't want to look helpless to their boss any more than we do. So don't expect them to admit that you may have a problem and that their firewall is not going to work perfectly. Find a way to communicate to your boss the criticality of someone hacking your security system and turning off alarms at 2 am instead of 6 am and the case for your own network with no portal to the outside world will be easier to make.
Coincidentally, before this hacking attempt occurred I introduced a proposed change to the "Suggested Guidelines for Museum Security" saying that sharing of a network is not acceptable. This event helps make my point even more dramatically.
By the way, if you are interested in the exact wording of these proposed changes and others you can check them out at http://www.stevekeller.com/guidelines/revisions.htm where they have been posted for the committee to work with, and feel free to email me with your thoughts or dissent and I will present it to the committee.
Steve Keller
Museum Security Consultant
steve@stevekeller.com
Heritage museum in crisis over slump
John Innes
AN award-winning textile museum that tells the story of Scotland’s role in the once- booming jute industry has become the first high-profile victim of the Scottish tourism crisis. The Dundee Heritage Trust, which runs the Verdant Works museum along with the Discovery Point attraction, warned a 50 per cent slump in tourist visitors over Easter would result in the closure of the textile museum unless further funding can be secured.
full story:
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/scotland.cfm?id=74489
Russia: Germany Sees Slow Progress In Regaining Art Treasures
By Roland Eggleston
German culture officials are distressed that negotiations with Russia on the return of art works taken during World War II have virtually ground to a halt. According to German sources, a recent international conference on looted art held in Moscow failed to make any progress and, in the view of some, demonstrated a Russian reluctance to return art works to Germany, Hungary, Poland, and other countries.
Munich, 21 May 2001 (RFE/RL) -- An international conference on the return of art works plundered during World War II was convened early this month by Yekaterina Genieva, director of Moscow's Library for Foreign Literature. The intention was to find compromises that would enable the return of at least some of the art works taken by Soviet troops from Germany and other European countries during the war. It is believed that Russia still holds more than 134,000 works of art removed from Germany by Soviet troops. These include paintings by Van Gogh and Degas, sculptures, paintings, and centuries-old books -- including a Gutenburg bible. Russia also retains thousands of similar items taken from Hungary, Poland, and other Eastern European countries. Negotiations between Russia and Germany have been underway since 1991 but so far have produced very limited results. Negotiations with other countries have been equally unsuccessful, as their representatives made clear at the Moscow conference. During the meeting, Germany was represented for the first time not only by art experts but also by a team of lawyers who tried to find ways around Russia's restrictions. They proposed, among other things, a Russian-German exhibition in Germany with a guarantee by Berlin that the works would be returned to Russia. They also revived the long-discarded idea of a Russian-German foundation to administer the art works now in Russian hands. A German lawyer, Karin Wollmann, said the proposals fell on deaf ears. She said some of the Russian participants showed interest in the German suggestions, but most of the officials did not. She said a senior official at Russia's Ministry of Culture, Yuri Titov, left the impression it could be a long time before all the hurdles were overcome. "Russia has always been reluctant to return these works of art, but now the negotiations have virtually come to a standstill. It is difficult to see what we can do to invigorate them." The Moscow conference ended without any progress being made on claims by Germany, Hungary, Poland, or other countries. Germany's only real success in the decade-long negotiations on the looted art came last year, when Russia issued an export license for 101 drawings and engravings that were taken from the Bremen Kunsthalle. Among 43 drawings and 56 graphic prints were works by Durer, Goya, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Delacroix, and several Dutch and Flemish artists. The heirs of the Soviet officer who took them gave them to the German embassy in 1993, but Russian law had prevented their return. The return was made possible by changes in Russian law to differentiate between officially collected Soviet spoils of war and looting by individual Soviet soldiers. German negotiators, however, have not been able to retrieve another 362 drawings that were taken by a former Soviet officer, Viktor Baldin. They also include works by Durer, Goya, and other world-renown artists. The works are believed to be in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, where 138 of them were exhibited in 1992. Germany's current chief goal is the return of the 14th-century stained-glass windows that once graced the Marienkirche in the eastern German city of Frankfurt an der Oder. They are now in storage at the Hermitage. The German Cultural Ministry in Berlin says negotiations for their return have been underway for some time. But the director of the Hermitage, Mikhail Piotrovski, says he first wants to exhibit them to the Russian public. The windows are important for art historians for their depiction of the life of the Antichrist in a parody of the life of Jesus. The Cultural Ministry says it still hopes that Russia will act generously because of the help donated by Germany in the restoration of the famous Amber Room in a palace at Tsarskoje Selo near Saint Petersburg. It was dismantled by German troops in 1941 and sent to Kaliningrad, where it disappeared in the heavy fighting at the end of the war. Most experts believe it was probably destroyed in a fire. The room is being recreated with the help of a $3.5 million grant from the giant German gas company, Ruhrgas. Germany has also returned a mosaic and a chest of drawers from the Amber Room that turned up in Germany. The Moscow conference also heard from Hungarian cultural experts seeking the return of books, paintings, porcelain, statues, and other goods taken from the collections of wealthy families and from banks, museums, and churches. The Ministry of Culture in Budapest has published a list of more than 3,000 items known to have been taken. By chance, the conference happened to coincide with an exhibition in Moscow of some of these valuable old Hungarian books and manuscripts. They were once the pride of the library at the protestant religious college at Szaroszpatak in northeastern Hungary. They have been stored since the war in the Volga River city of Nizhny Novgorod. Hungarian church authorities had placed the most valuable volumes and prints in two banks in Budapest for safety, but they were discovered when the banks were looted. Among them are 16th- and 17th-century religious prints published in Utrecht, the Netherlands. German lawyer Wollmann says a major problem is that Russian authorities actually discourage individuals from returning art treasures the way the heirs of the officer who took the Bremen drawings eventually returned them to the German embassy. She said that when the issue came up at the Moscow conference, Russian cultural official Titov said the task of returning the works of art should be left to his ministry. "One serious problem is that the Russian authorities want to keep everything under the control of the Ministry of Culture. We know of private individuals who want to return works of art directly without too much bureaucracy, but the ministry strongly opposes such initiatives." An official of the German Culture Ministry -- who asked not to be identified -- told RFE/RL that despite the problems, current Russian law does allow some opportunities for museums and even individuals to apply for the return of their collections. But the official warned that it would not be easy. He said that in most cases, months -- and possibly years -- of patient and imaginative negotiations would be required before an agreement could be reached that would satisfy both sides.
http://www.rferl.org/
Settlement may let Terra move off Michigan Avenue
By Robert Becker, Tribune staff reporter
The Terra Museum of American Art will stay in Illinois -- but be free to move from its North Michigan Avenue home -- under a tentative settlement reached in a lengthy legal battle over the museum's future, according to sources close to the deal. Lawyers were set to return to court Monday to report to a Circuit Court judge on their progress on the tentative settlement, which would drop allegations of mismanagement leveled in a lawsuit against a faction of board members on the foundation that runs the Terra. Other proposed provisions call for the ultimate restructuring of the foundation board, a review of the museum's mission as well as the freedom to explore alliances with other institutions, sources said. Word of the tentative deal was announced last week in court, but the details have remained secret, protected by a judge's gag order.
full story:
http://chicagotribune.com/news/metro/chicago/article/0,2669,ART-51907,FF.html