British Museum to digitize its entire collection after major theft incident

The British Museum said on Wednesday it plans to digitize its entire collection, after a theft incident it had reported in August which left hundreds of artefacts missing.

“We have taken steps to improve security and are now confident that a theft of this kind can never happen again,” the British Museum’s interim director, Mark Jones, said in a statement.

“But we cannot and must not assume that the security of the collection, in a wider sense, can be achieved simply by locking everything away. It is my belief that the single most important response to the thefts is to increase access.”