A website that visualises loan movements between national and international museums using a map.
The Loan Monitor project is intended to gain insight into the nature and extent of loans between museums. It specifically concerns short-term, incoming and outgoing loans for exhibitions.
For this purpose, loan data were collected and projected onto a map. The sources used were annual reports, exhibition catalogues and exhibition loan lists.
The promotion of collection mobility has long been a policy topic in the museum sector, not only in the Netherlands but also internationally. The reason? Museum objects are often located in depots where the general public cannot view them. Nonetheless objects can be viewed by being loaned to other museums for exhibitions.
There were no available figures on the volume of loan movements until the introduction of the loans monitor. The geographical extent of the loan traffic was also not well known. The loan monitor (see Results) corrects this omission.