Why does nobody talk about mislabeled artifacts in museum catalogs?

I spent 4 months tracking a bronze bowl in the Met's online database, only to find out it was actually a Roman lamp holder from a dig in Cyprus... the catalog photo matched but the metadata was completely off. The curator finally admitted they had a batch of mislabeled entries from the 1980s and they still haven't fixed half of them. Has anyone else hit this wall trying to trace provenance through digital archives?

2 comments

2 Comments

sean_park826d ago

I mislabel my own Tupperware lids, so catalog chaos checks out.

riverhill26d ago

Honestly I used to think people were just being dramatic about their cataloging systems, but @sean_park8, you might have just convinced me it's a universal thing. Now I'm second-guessing every label I've ever trusted.