Diva Dorothy's Database

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Dorothy King has announced on her PhDiva website that she's concerned about all the looted artefacts that are on the market these days (Looting: Egypt, Libya, The Medici Archive etc) She says she's

been working on a database of looted and potentially looted archaeological material, because none seem to exist and after the problems earlier this year in Egypt, and the potential issues in Libya [...] one is badly needed. Initial conversations seem to be ... well everyone's getting political, and frankly is 'sitting' on their own material without sharing it, which kinda defeats the purpose of having photos as they are not doing any good if others don't know about them. I've dropped a few people emails as a courtesy to let them know I'm starting to put in Freedom of Information requests to get access to the photographs.

Good idea. I'd be interested to see what answer she'd get to a FOI request to the British government to release photographs of all the "looted and potentially looted archaeological material" that has surfaced on the British market in the last decade or so.

Of course the people who really ARE sitting on a lot of information are dealers who refuse to share with each other and their customers where the antiquities they sell actually come from. I'd like to ask what effect her archived photographs will have when dealers refuse to acknowledge that the artefacts they are selling are shown in them? There have been several cases of precisely this recently - surely that tells us something about the trade.

Who is going to finance the long term maintenance of this database? How will PhDiva ensure the information in it does not get into the wrong hands? How much is she insuring herself for in the case of being sued for wrongful claims or one Mafia or another interesting themselves in what she is doing and its effect on their business partnerships?
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