Privacy and security

What is never published

• The storage location of the object, and any address associated with it.
• The owner's residential address.
• Security and alarm arrangements.
• Insurance details of any kind.
• Real-time movement of the object, including transit and travel dates.

These are not held in this database at all, which is a stronger guarantee than a policy of not displaying them. Custody is stated at city level and no more precisely.

Images

Any image published by this project has its EXIF and GPS metadata stripped before publication. This is checked as part of the imaging workflow rather than trusted to the photographer's settings.

Events

Where an exhibition, loan or study session involves the object moving, it is recorded in the provenance after the fact, not before or during.

People

Contributors are credited by the name they give and nothing else. ORCID and affiliation are optional and are recorded only if supplied. Correspondence — including a submission that is declined — is not published with identifying details unless the person agrees.

Requests for study access and loans go to a private workflow. The public forms ask for what is needed to have a first conversation and no more: no personal financial information, no identity documents, no security information about your institution.

Analytics

The site measures whether the record is useful to researchers, not who is reading it. There is no advertising, no third-party tracking, no cross-site identifiers, and no fonts, scripts or images loaded from anyone else's servers — the pages you are reading make no requests outside this domain.

Reporting a problem

If you find something published here that should not have been — a location detail, a piece of personal information, an image with metadata intact — tell us and it will be removed the same day, before any discussion about whether it mattered.