It's a shame that they don't make their catalogue filterable by license. A lot of museums have everything available under CC0, but the British Museum only has some stuff under a creative cc BY-NC-SA.
It's ironic too given that it's a museum that's famous for having stored a lot of the world's most important archaeological treasures while destroying the chronology of the most important sites in the process.
I was surprised that I couldn't find Henry Maudslay's thread cutting lathe... Turns out the Science museum isn't a part of the British museum like I had assumed.
I visited a few days ago while on business in London with a few hours
to burn.
There is now an airport-style security channel with staff who open and
scan your bags.
For 30 years I've been a casual visitor to the British Museum and have
never seen this. It used to be lunch-time detour when I was at UCL to
walk through the ground floor simply as a shortcut from Russell
Square.
I am not sure what their threat model is; maybe vandalism as protest,
but as a security anecdote it's amazing to see all of this security
theatre while all along it was the staff (and probably those in high
positions) who were sneaking out millions of pounds of treasure.
Through the lens of security thinking I now see it as axiomatic that
the consequences for the misdeeds of the privileged and powerful
always fall upon the innocent and vulnerable.
This needs incorporating into the root of any formal account of
security thinking - because we always seem to be wasting our time
scrutinising and inconveniencing the wrong people.
It could be related to a lot of recent Just Stop Oil protests, where orange paint / powder is thrown on artworks in museums, on pitches and playing surfaces at live sports events, and many other imaginative examples.
People have been complaining about security at the British Museum since the white tents went up in 2015 as a space todo bag searches (due to increase in terrorism and vandalism) Isn’t the airport style security an attempt to make that process easier and quicker than the manual bag search?
The implementation of airport-level security for visitors is quite astonishing. As you say, it's unfortunate that we are bearing the brunt for what appears to be transgressions by the establishment's personnel.
We might be the world champions of pilfering stuff, but we really dropped the ball when it comes to teaching the rest of the world about the finer points of "finders keepers".
Also, bizarrely, Nixon is listed as "Richard Nixon," Trump as "Donald Trump," Kennedy as "John F Kennedy," the Bush's as "President George Bush" and "President George W Bush," and for some reason Obama as "Barack Hussein Obama." Are they worried he'll be confused with all the other Barack Obamas? Why are only the Bush's "president?"
It's ironic too given that it's a museum that's famous for having stored a lot of the world's most important archaeological treasures while destroying the chronology of the most important sites in the process.