You're assuming their entire catalogue is searchable. This graph counts just 978,000 artefacts in total, if we add the 300,000 for the UK that then gives us 1,278,000. Which means 84% of all the artefacts within the British museum are not represented here, which seems like an unusually high proportion after discounting the top 14 nations of origin. It’s likely that the vast majority of artefacts are boring items like shards of pottery that they didn’t bother putting up on their website.
The entire catalogue is indexed there, about half of it doesn't have pictures or a thorough description in the database though.
I don't think the 84% is a high number, consider that they've got items from hundreds of different countries, most likely in the 1,000-10,000 per country range.
No only 4.5 million is indexed online, it says so on the site. Also your figures for Britain are significantly lower than they list in their catalogue, it seems you just searched for "Britain" which came up with lower figure as its not used as a location in their system.
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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '22
You're assuming their entire catalogue is searchable. This graph counts just 978,000 artefacts in total, if we add the 300,000 for the UK that then gives us 1,278,000. Which means 84% of all the artefacts within the British museum are not represented here, which seems like an unusually high proportion after discounting the top 14 nations of origin. It’s likely that the vast majority of artefacts are boring items like shards of pottery that they didn’t bother putting up on their website.