Dear colleagues,
I am in need of a scheduling program for posting guards in our museum. All of the programs I have viewed are for guard agencies with multiple sites. I need to be able to print a roll for daily use by the supervisors and the guards. Due to a clause in my union contract, I must rotate gallery posts daily. We would also like to track attendance, lateness and overtime. This all needs to be accomplished on a Windows 2000 platform.
I would also be interested in an Incident Reporting/index program for aided cases, alarms, etc also on a Windows 2000 platform.
Sincerely, Ron Simoncini
Director of Security The Museum of Modern Art (212) 708-9464 Ron_Simoncini@moma.org
Smugglers caught with Sudan's first fully-preserved, authentic mummy
KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) -- Antiquity smugglers found Sudan's first fully-preserved mummy, which belongs to a royal family member of the Cush kingdom. But they did not profit from their discovery. This week they were arrested after trying to sell the mummy to a police officer posing as an antiquity dealer, the commercial branch of the police said in a statement.
"This is the most important archaeological discovery of its kind in the royal cemetery of Napata," the secretary of the Sudanese Museum, Siddeek Mohammed Gism al-Seed, said Wednesday. The mummy is believed to be the body of a member of the family of King Taharka, arguably the most famous monarch of the Cush dynasty, which ruled northern Sudan from the 11th to the fourth century BC. For part of that period, the Cush capital was at Napata, whose ruins lie near the modern town of Merowe, 350 kilometres north of Khartoum. "Everything in the mummy is intact, including the hair, the teeth, the skin and the beard," al-Seed told The Associated Press. He said the remarkable preservation stemmed from the extremely skilled mummification as well as the dry desert sand in which the body had been buried. The mummy has been flown to Khartoum and is now in the museum, where experts are examining it to determine its identity, al-Seed said. The police statement said they had been watching the two smugglers since they first appeared in Khartoum in February seeking a buyer for the mummy. The smugglers had recovered the mummy in its grave and were showing photographs to interested parties. They were arrested after the police officer who posed as a buyer had agreed to buy the mummy for 1.5 billion Sudanese pounds ($586,000 US), the statement said. http://www.canoe.ca/
Appeals court rejects plan to sell Titanic artifacts
An appeals court is refusing to let an Atlanta salvage company sell artifacts recovered from the wreck of the Titanic.
It has upheld a decision that the firm RMS Titanic does not have a right to the objects taken from the bottom of the sea.
The company has recovered about 6,000 items since the wreck was found 1985, including the base of a statue from the grand staircase. Other items include pieces of glass and debris, part of the ship's wheel and passengers' personal belongings and the bronze base of a statue from the grand staircase. In 1994, after a long legal battle, a US District Judge granted RMS Titanic the exclusive rights to bring up items from the wreck. Later, however, the company wanted to begin selling some or all of the items because of financial difficulty.
This was disallowed but the company appealed.
A lawyer claimed the judge's ban on sale of Titanic artifacts was inconsistent with admiralty law, which governs rights to sunken ships. But the appeals court rejected the argument. The company, which continues to salvage Titanic artifacts, says the restrictions might force it into bankruptcy. The ruling comes just days before the 90th anniversary of the sinking of the luxury liner. The ship went down in the North Atlantic in 1912 on its maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg. More than 1,500 people died.
A vandal who damaged a priceless Michelangelo statue is being allowed day release to work in an art museum. Piero Cannata was confined to a psychiatric hospital after damaging the statue in 1991. The Italian says he broke a toe off Michelangelo's David because a spirit told him to. According to The Times, he has been granted day release to work as an art museum guide.
From: "Ferguson, Mike" Mike_Ferguson@ago.net To: "'Museum Security Network'" securma@xs4all.nl
Subject: RE: security queries MOMA New York (guard schedules, incidents re porting software)
At the Art Gallery of Ontario we use the Intime scheduling solution(approximate cost $3000). It addresses all the needs that you require except for the daily roll call. To address this we had Intime develop a custom roll call(approximate cost $1500)that is Microsoft access based. To address the post rotation, we developed a master rotation based on start time and location. The set up was the time consuming part, but once completed we can roll our schedule over however many weeks we want in advance. We have found the software to be very cost efficient and effective. As an extension, we also had Intime generate an automated payroll report(approximate cost $1800) so that the payroll is run automatically in hard copy format. We are looking at the next step this year with the payroll report being soft copy and integrating directly with the HRIS system.
If you require any further information, give me a call.
Mike Ferguson Manager, Protections Services Art Gallery of Ontario (4160 979-6660 x.305
From: adalberto biasiotti securcomp@mclink.it To: Museum Security Network securma@xs4all.nl
Subject: Re: security queries MOMA New York (guard schedules, incidents reporting software)
Fri Apr 12, 5:46 PM ET By Gail Appleson, Law Correspondent
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. government won a ruling on Friday allowing it to proceed with a lawsuit aimed at forcing an Austrian museum to forfeit an Egon Schiele painting stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish family during World War Two. In his decision, U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey denied motions by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Austria's Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung to dismiss the suit pending in Manhattan federal court. The dispute stems from a 1999 lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court by the U.S. government seeking the surrender of the painting, "Portrait of Wally," which had been loaned to MoMA by the Leopold. Federal prosecutors alleged the painting was stolen property under Austrian law and thus illegally imported into the United States. A federal magistrate issued a warrant that allowed the government to seize the painting from the MoMA and it has been held in the United States since then. Court papers said the work by the Expressionist painter had been owned by Lea Bondi Jaray, a Viennese Jew. It was confiscated in 1939 by Friedrich Welz, a Nazi party member. After the war, Welz was interned on suspicion of committing war crimes. His possessions were seized and placed under the authority of U.S. forces in Austria, which erroneously listed the painting as belonging to a Heinrich Rieger and placed it in his collection. Rieger's heirs sold the "Portrait of Wally," which was eventually purchased by the Leopold. The Leopold argued that even if the painting was stolen by Welz, it "ceased being stolen when it was recovered by the United States forces." Mukasey had dismissed the government's original case in 2000 but had allowed prosecutors to file an amended lawsuit containing new arguments. In dismissing the earlier suit, the judge said that the Leopold could not be considered the holder of stolen property because the painting had been recovered by U.S. forces before the museum bought it. He had cited a federal recovery doctrine that holds an individual or entity cannot be convicted of receiving stolen goods if the property had been recovered by the owners or their agent, including the police. Police in this case was interpreted to apply to U.S. forces. However, the judge allowed the government to file an amended suit arguing that paintings seized during and after the war were not held by U.S. forces with an eye to returning them to their true owners. In the amended suit, prosecutors argued that military decrees had ordered that seized goods be returned to their country of origin. In his ruling on Friday, Mukasey said that based on new factual allegations, he no longer found the recovery doctrine applicable because the U.S. armed forces cannot properly be deemed an agent of the Jewish family. "Rather than 'recovering' stolen property, the United States Armed Forces were simply collecting all property. They did not even know Wally was stolen. Nor were they 'charged by law' with holding Wally on Bondi's behalf or with securing Wally's eventual return," Mukasey said. The Art Newspaper.com
This week's top stories:
CALIFORNIA COURT ORDERS AUSTRIA TO MEDIATE CLAIM THAT KLIMTS ARE NAZI LOOT
LOS ANGELES. A federal appeals court has taken the unexpected step of ordering Austria and an opposing claimant to enter into mediation in California in a claim seeking six Klimt paintings said to have been stolen from a Jewish owner by Nazis. The action appears to be the first time that a federal court has ordered a foreign nation to take part in mediation in a case before its defense of sovereign immunity from lawsuit is resolved. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=9276
CHALLENGE TO PROLONGED COPYRIGHT
WASHINGTON. The United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear a constitutional challenge to a 1998 federal law that extends existing and future copyrights, including those on visual images, for a period that critics say is too long. The decision would have sweeping effects on when copyrighted images and artworks can be freely reproduced and disseminated by others. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=9275
INTERVIEW WITH FRANCESCO BONAMI
The appointment of Francesco Bonami as the curator of next year’s Venice Biennale puts an end to speculation about who would take the role. Mr Bonami, 47, is a senior curator at Chicago Museum and former editor of the magazine Flash Art. Here he talks to the Art Newspaper about the task of curating the most hyped biennial. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=9274
SLANDER, SCANDAL AND SGARBI
LONDON. How reassuring to discover that art/political scandals are not just the province of contemporary ‘shock’ artists, such as Serrano, Hirst and Ofili. Italian Old Masters, too, have enough geopolitical suasion to provoke diplomatic incidents between affluent, 21st-century States. This is what happened last month in Canberra, when an exhibition of 107 Renaissance, Mannerist and baroque paintings called “The Italians: three centuries of Italian art” opened at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), only to be met by a scathing front page review in Rupert Murdoch’s national flagship daily, The Australian. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=9273
FROM PARIS TO WARSAW
PARIS. The Baroque sculpture dealer Andrej Ciechanowiecki, influential friend and mentor of many dealers and curators today, is to sell his collection of French 17th-, 18th- and 19th- century oil sketches. http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=9270