system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How can stuff be "rediscovered" in museum collections? Don't museums keep a detailed list of everything they have?
gpt
Not all museum records are as good as you might hope. Detailing everything in a museum collection can be quite hard. And then keeping the records and catalogs up to date is a continuous effort. Things get mislabled or misplaced all the time. If you have a giant collection you might only look at an artifact once every century. So it can take quite some time before an error is discovered. Museums are getting better at cataloging things as digital catalogs can store more information and it is easier to identify artifacts as you have much easier access to information. So museum curators are getting more time to go though their artifacts to make a more detailed catalog and find errors in previous catalogs. So you are getting more and more stories about museum curators finding things in their collections that for some reason did not have a catalog entry.