Online museum inventories, with details of acquisition and provenance, are another rich source of information.
Several stuffed dodos were also mentioned in old museum inventories, but none are known to have survived.
He noted that contents of two underground vaults at the Iraqi Central Bank where many antiquities were placed for safe-keeping have yet to be opened, and museum inventories have yet to be verified.
At the National Museum in Warsaw, Roman Olkowski, deputy director of the museum's inventory department, has for the last 15 years been documenting the 780,000 items in the permanent galleries.
They were accomplices in the creation of the most eccentric items in the museum's inventory: cigar boxes filled with neat stacks of canceled stamps.
The director of Iraq's Interpol office, Salahudin al-Tahi, noted that records of the museum's inventory were destroyed during the looting, complicating efforts to identify looted works abroad and make a legal case for their repatriation.
A page from that catalogue, faxed to Webber by the Gemäldemuseum's curators, was proof enough: there, in the top left-hand corner of the page, was a postage-stamp sized reproduction of "my" Eleonora, together with the museum's inventory number and a brief attribution to Allessandro Allori.
The museum is inventorying its vast collection of frames.
There have already been some critical quibbles about the less-than-perfect movement through virtual space, and the quirky incompleteness of the museums' proffered inventory.
Hundreds of crates containing works of art, mostly from the collections of the Berlin museums, were inventoried and made available for restitution of cultural property of foreign origin imported into Germany since 1939.
