In February this year, 8,000 books, worth at least £250,000, were found to be missing from the British Library since its move in 1997 to new headquarters on London's Euston Road. While 43 items have been identified as indisputably stolen, 7,905 other missing books and documents, the taxpayer is reassured, are likely to have been simply misfiled among the 400 miles of shelving; they may turn up again.
Some of the more marketable materials - for example, a haul of comics worth over £20,000, including the Beano that first featured Dennis the Menace (17 March, 1951 issue) - are presumed stolen to order.
These losses at the British Library, where access is restricted to a few well-vetted enthusiasts, show extraordinary laxity and incompetence in security matters. Other national collections have to provide access to the general public, whom they are required to attract in
ever-growing numbers - yet they report fewer incidents.
But the balance between access and security in our public museums is one that cannot always be achieved, as the above events show. First, the Victoria and Albert Museum was targeted on 4 October, when nine Chinese jade artefacts worth £60,000 were stolen. Then on 29 October it was the British Museum's turn.
Fifteen pieces of Chinese jewellery including armlets, earrings and a gold diadem, worth an estimated £85,000, were taken from a case in the long Oriental Antiquities Gallery. On 24 November, 15 18th-century Meissen figures worth over £30,000 were stolen from the V&A.
In early December a thief made off with a crystal that had belonged to Tudor astronomer John Dee on permanent loan to the Science Museum from the Wellcome Medical Collection and valued at £50,000.
And, on 29 December, the V&A suffered a third burglary: eight Italian Renaissance bronze plaquettes, valued at £400,000, were lost. Finally, on 26 January, a man was spotted in the British Museum, trying to break into one of the cases of antiquities.
Of course, thefts are not restricted to high-profile metropolitan museums: collections ranging from Portsmouth City Museum to Shibden Hall Museum, Halifax, have suffered similar losses in the past year. And it should be emphasised that this sorry tale does not indicate a sustained crime wave.
Museum thefts are relatively few and, if anything, the trend is downward, says Iain Slessor, the National Security Advisor for the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. Slessor is the chairman of the Museums and Galleries Security Group of around 80 security managers from mu-seums nationwide who share good practice and pool information on crimes.
Individual museums can't be forced to notify any central body of crimes, and so his data is sketchy, but Slessor has noticed a marked decline of theft alerts over the last decade. In 1995/96, 54 thefts came to his attention, and the reports peaked at 56 in 1996/97; in 2003/04 only 15 were reported.
However, in cold cash terms, the price of museum crime can be high. The V&A tally in the final quarter of 2004 added up to £500,000 worth of objects. The additional spend in the financial year April 2004/05, allocated to the museum for upgrading and implementing new security systems, will come to £200,000.
It is probable that, like the Science Museum crystal, some of these losses, especially the V&A's distinctive Renaissance plaquettes, will be returned. Well-known paintings are the most likely loot to be recovered. In January 1999, an armed robbery at York City Art Gallery stripped the collection of 20 works including a JMW Turner watercolour of Rievaulx Abbey.
After wide publicity and persistent work by the South Yorkshire Police, the whole haul was recovered in mid-May of the same year. Nine Expressionist paintings snatched from a Berlin gallery in April 2002 were found in a Berlin flat less than a month later.
Stolen from a Frankfurt exhibition in 1994, the Tate's brace of Turners returned to the gallery at the end of 2002. Familiarity makes an artwork more risky to fence and restricts its value to the thief.
Alexandra Smith, the operations manager of the Art Loss Register, is engaged in tracking hundreds of lost museum pieces going back to the late 1960s, including objects stolen from around 150 UK museums.
She is not a supporter of the 'stolen to order' theory so popular in the press. 'Objects are either sold to dealers who have a good base of collectors to sell on to, held to ransom by the thieves or handlers, or simply stolen to advertise the ability of the gang of thieves.
The two pictures stolen from the Munch Museum [two Edvard Munch paintings worth £10m, taken in a daylight raid on the Oslo museum in August 2004] are a good example of an organised theft thought to have been performed in the hopes that Eastern European gangs would see the perpetrators as a more international gang and take them more seriously.'
Most villains, with the more modest ambition of making a relatively risk-free profit, target the smaller, portable objects that are less identifiable but still valuable.
Dick Ellis, formerly the head of New Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Squad and now a private consultant in risk and recovery of art, confirms this. 'The recent trend has been for theft of good, but not unique objects, with a wide appeal within the antiques market.'
He suggests that one way to deter these thefts is to introduce security marking to ensure stolen objects can be identified and returned. He is referring to products such as Smartwater ('DNA' liquid that can be traced back to a unique owner), near-invisible microdots (similarly unique to each owner) and tiny transponders with the museum's details encoded.
Ellis adds: 'Most museums have good external security now, difficult to penetrate when shut, without setting off alarms. The MO that has been used time and again recently is theft during opening hours, distracting the guard on duty, or waiting until he is in another room, whilst the showcase - usually the old-fashioned unalarmed timber type - is forced open and property removed.'
Warders, whose presence is a huge deterrent to crime, are being cut back by ever-tightening budgets, so museums are increasingly looking at electronic options to restore the balance. There is plenty of technology on the market that addresses the problem of daytime snatches.
Artguard is used in various National Trust and NT Scotland historic houses, and the Open Churches Trust. The product is designed for populous, shadowy, hard to invigilate rooms, and consists of sensors and a siren that sounds as soon as a protected object is moved.
Euronova's GalleryMaster systems are designed to complement security systems with less than generous manpower. Clive Stevens, the managing director of Euronova, has provided systems to
protect loan exhibitions at the Science Museum and the V&A. He says: 'One major council-run museum has implemented a complete object protection system, combining it with CCTV.
If a protected object is touched the cameras in the control room automatically pan onto the object and also the exits to each gallery. By doing this, they have been able to avoid replacing four invigilators, who recently retired, saving well over £100,000 a year.
The security manager believes the objects are actually more secure now there is a better balance between technology and manning.'
Another option, aside from beefing up physical and electronic systems, is to source additional expertise. Iain Slessor of MLA's Museum and Galleries Security Group is an invaluable first resort.
He says: 'We do a post-theft survey and make recommendations. We give them the ideal scenario and, knowing that they might not be able to afford that, highlight the most important points, so that they can implement the plan in stages, as and when budget allows.'
The B word is the crux of the matter. Mark Dalrymple, the director of Tyler & Co, chartered loss adjusters, has often advised museums on post-theft recovery of art works.
He says: 'Lots of museums in the UK are trying to keep galleries open and improve their displays for visitors, but they don't have money for better security.' He adds: 'The BM and the V&A are highly cognizant of the risks - they work miracles on a shoestring.'
And how is it possible to do that? The easiest, but least popular, route is closures of rooms. The ceramics galleries at the V&A remains shut until further notice, while the Science Museum, even before the Dee incident, temporarily closed the gallery that hosted the famous Harrison watch.
The lesson that underinvestment doesn't pay, however, has been partially accepted. The V&A has received a much needed security budget boost of £200,000 following its incidents, and has announced some important measures.
A spokeswoman says: 'We doubled the number of security guards in the ceramics galleries after the thefts. The ceramics galleries are now closed but there is increased warding generally around the museum.' Old timber-framed cases are being replaced with much stronger steel and glass cases throughout the museum.
A spokesman at the BM says simply: 'We are constantly reviewing our security policies. If something needs to change we will change it.' mj
Katrina Burroughs is a writer specialising in museum security
The Summer issue of Museum Practice has a step-by-step guide on what to do when thieves strike. www.museumsassociation.org
Caught in the act
On Wednesday 26 January, at about 4.45pm, a visitor was browsing gallery 70 of the Greek and Roman gallery at the British Museum, when a warden noticed something suspicious. The man was holding something in his hand as he pored over one of the showcases. The guard's suspicions were confirmed: the man was clutching a pair of pliers and a length of wire, no doubt intending to force the structure and access the valuable antiquities inside.
The warden asked the man to stop what he was doing and was ignored, so he tackled him,calling for help from another guard. The museum's doors were locked and bemused visitors informed that staff had caught a thief and were searching for accomplices. Together they were able to restrain the felon, who was 40, until police arrived. No losses resulted.
On 29 December 2004, eight 10cm-high Renaissance bronze plaques (valued at over £500,000) were stolen from the V&A. This was the third attack on the museum in three months, and had much in common with the other incidents: it happened during a quiet period; it was focused on an area not covered by security cameras; the felon used tools to force open the side of one of the old wooden-framed showcases.
Even though warden numbers were doubled after the second theft (when Meissen porcelain was stolen in November 2004), the thief escaped unnoticed with his loot.
Mark Jones, the V&A's director, described it as: 'a well-planned professional theft'. However, the nature and timing of the crime led to speculation about 'inside knowledge'.
The bronzes occupied a case that would have been cleared for redisplay in the coming weeks,
as the security upgrade, planned after the loss of jade artefacts during the October incident, progressed.
Some of the more marketable materials - for example, a haul of comics worth over £20,000, including the Beano that first featured Dennis the Menace (17 March, 1951 issue) - are presumed stolen to order.
These losses at the British Library, where access is restricted to a few well-vetted enthusiasts, show extraordinary laxity and incompetence in security matters. Other national collections have to provide access to the general public, whom they are required to attract in
ever-growing numbers - yet they report fewer incidents.
But the balance between access and security in our public museums is one that cannot always be achieved, as the above events show. First, the Victoria and Albert Museum was targeted on 4 October, when nine Chinese jade artefacts worth £60,000 were stolen. Then on 29 October it was the British Museum's turn.
Fifteen pieces of Chinese jewellery including armlets, earrings and a gold diadem, worth an estimated £85,000, were taken from a case in the long Oriental Antiquities Gallery. On 24 November, 15 18th-century Meissen figures worth over £30,000 were stolen from the V&A.
In early December a thief made off with a crystal that had belonged to Tudor astronomer John Dee on permanent loan to the Science Museum from the Wellcome Medical Collection and valued at £50,000.
And, on 29 December, the V&A suffered a third burglary: eight Italian Renaissance bronze plaquettes, valued at £400,000, were lost. Finally, on 26 January, a man was spotted in the British Museum, trying to break into one of the cases of antiquities.
Of course, thefts are not restricted to high-profile metropolitan museums: collections ranging from Portsmouth City Museum to Shibden Hall Museum, Halifax, have suffered similar losses in the past year. And it should be emphasised that this sorry tale does not indicate a sustained crime wave.
Museum thefts are relatively few and, if anything, the trend is downward, says Iain Slessor, the National Security Advisor for the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. Slessor is the chairman of the Museums and Galleries Security Group of around 80 security managers from mu-seums nationwide who share good practice and pool information on crimes.
Individual museums can't be forced to notify any central body of crimes, and so his data is sketchy, but Slessor has noticed a marked decline of theft alerts over the last decade. In 1995/96, 54 thefts came to his attention, and the reports peaked at 56 in 1996/97; in 2003/04 only 15 were reported.
However, in cold cash terms, the price of museum crime can be high. The V&A tally in the final quarter of 2004 added up to £500,000 worth of objects. The additional spend in the financial year April 2004/05, allocated to the museum for upgrading and implementing new security systems, will come to £200,000.
It is probable that, like the Science Museum crystal, some of these losses, especially the V&A's distinctive Renaissance plaquettes, will be returned. Well-known paintings are the most likely loot to be recovered. In January 1999, an armed robbery at York City Art Gallery stripped the collection of 20 works including a JMW Turner watercolour of Rievaulx Abbey.
After wide publicity and persistent work by the South Yorkshire Police, the whole haul was recovered in mid-May of the same year. Nine Expressionist paintings snatched from a Berlin gallery in April 2002 were found in a Berlin flat less than a month later.
Stolen from a Frankfurt exhibition in 1994, the Tate's brace of Turners returned to the gallery at the end of 2002. Familiarity makes an artwork more risky to fence and restricts its value to the thief.
Alexandra Smith, the operations manager of the Art Loss Register, is engaged in tracking hundreds of lost museum pieces going back to the late 1960s, including objects stolen from around 150 UK museums.
She is not a supporter of the 'stolen to order' theory so popular in the press. 'Objects are either sold to dealers who have a good base of collectors to sell on to, held to ransom by the thieves or handlers, or simply stolen to advertise the ability of the gang of thieves.
The two pictures stolen from the Munch Museum [two Edvard Munch paintings worth £10m, taken in a daylight raid on the Oslo museum in August 2004] are a good example of an organised theft thought to have been performed in the hopes that Eastern European gangs would see the perpetrators as a more international gang and take them more seriously.'
Most villains, with the more modest ambition of making a relatively risk-free profit, target the smaller, portable objects that are less identifiable but still valuable.
Dick Ellis, formerly the head of New Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Squad and now a private consultant in risk and recovery of art, confirms this. 'The recent trend has been for theft of good, but not unique objects, with a wide appeal within the antiques market.'
He suggests that one way to deter these thefts is to introduce security marking to ensure stolen objects can be identified and returned. He is referring to products such as Smartwater ('DNA' liquid that can be traced back to a unique owner), near-invisible microdots (similarly unique to each owner) and tiny transponders with the museum's details encoded.
Ellis adds: 'Most museums have good external security now, difficult to penetrate when shut, without setting off alarms. The MO that has been used time and again recently is theft during opening hours, distracting the guard on duty, or waiting until he is in another room, whilst the showcase - usually the old-fashioned unalarmed timber type - is forced open and property removed.'
Warders, whose presence is a huge deterrent to crime, are being cut back by ever-tightening budgets, so museums are increasingly looking at electronic options to restore the balance. There is plenty of technology on the market that addresses the problem of daytime snatches.
Artguard is used in various National Trust and NT Scotland historic houses, and the Open Churches Trust. The product is designed for populous, shadowy, hard to invigilate rooms, and consists of sensors and a siren that sounds as soon as a protected object is moved.
Euronova's GalleryMaster systems are designed to complement security systems with less than generous manpower. Clive Stevens, the managing director of Euronova, has provided systems to
protect loan exhibitions at the Science Museum and the V&A. He says: 'One major council-run museum has implemented a complete object protection system, combining it with CCTV.
If a protected object is touched the cameras in the control room automatically pan onto the object and also the exits to each gallery. By doing this, they have been able to avoid replacing four invigilators, who recently retired, saving well over £100,000 a year.
The security manager believes the objects are actually more secure now there is a better balance between technology and manning.'
Another option, aside from beefing up physical and electronic systems, is to source additional expertise. Iain Slessor of MLA's Museum and Galleries Security Group is an invaluable first resort.
He says: 'We do a post-theft survey and make recommendations. We give them the ideal scenario and, knowing that they might not be able to afford that, highlight the most important points, so that they can implement the plan in stages, as and when budget allows.'
The B word is the crux of the matter. Mark Dalrymple, the director of Tyler & Co, chartered loss adjusters, has often advised museums on post-theft recovery of art works.
He says: 'Lots of museums in the UK are trying to keep galleries open and improve their displays for visitors, but they don't have money for better security.' He adds: 'The BM and the V&A are highly cognizant of the risks - they work miracles on a shoestring.'
And how is it possible to do that? The easiest, but least popular, route is closures of rooms. The ceramics galleries at the V&A remains shut until further notice, while the Science Museum, even before the Dee incident, temporarily closed the gallery that hosted the famous Harrison watch.
The lesson that underinvestment doesn't pay, however, has been partially accepted. The V&A has received a much needed security budget boost of £200,000 following its incidents, and has announced some important measures.
A spokeswoman says: 'We doubled the number of security guards in the ceramics galleries after the thefts. The ceramics galleries are now closed but there is increased warding generally around the museum.' Old timber-framed cases are being replaced with much stronger steel and glass cases throughout the museum.
A spokesman at the BM says simply: 'We are constantly reviewing our security policies. If something needs to change we will change it.' mj
Katrina Burroughs is a writer specialising in museum security
The Summer issue of Museum Practice has a step-by-step guide on what to do when thieves strike. www.museumsassociation.org
Caught in the act
On Wednesday 26 January, at about 4.45pm, a visitor was browsing gallery 70 of the Greek and Roman gallery at the British Museum, when a warden noticed something suspicious. The man was holding something in his hand as he pored over one of the showcases. The guard's suspicions were confirmed: the man was clutching a pair of pliers and a length of wire, no doubt intending to force the structure and access the valuable antiquities inside.
The warden asked the man to stop what he was doing and was ignored, so he tackled him,calling for help from another guard. The museum's doors were locked and bemused visitors informed that staff had caught a thief and were searching for accomplices. Together they were able to restrain the felon, who was 40, until police arrived. No losses resulted.
On 29 December 2004, eight 10cm-high Renaissance bronze plaques (valued at over £500,000) were stolen from the V&A. This was the third attack on the museum in three months, and had much in common with the other incidents: it happened during a quiet period; it was focused on an area not covered by security cameras; the felon used tools to force open the side of one of the old wooden-framed showcases.
Even though warden numbers were doubled after the second theft (when Meissen porcelain was stolen in November 2004), the thief escaped unnoticed with his loot.
Mark Jones, the V&A's director, described it as: 'a well-planned professional theft'. However, the nature and timing of the crime led to speculation about 'inside knowledge'.
The bronzes occupied a case that would have been cleared for redisplay in the coming weeks,
as the security upgrade, planned after the loss of jade artefacts during the October incident, progressed.
