Cataloguing in a museum setting [was Re: nonsense...]

As most of us know, often it's the 'little bits' (boot disks, manuals, even cables) that can be hell to find and are very important. I cna think of 2 obvious ways that that could have occured. 1) The machine as accepted as an empty chassis. Now, there's nothing wrong in that, but it darn well should have been catalogued as such. More commonly, only 1 or 2 internal bits have been removed (perhaps to keep another machine running), that's whyh I feel that cataloguing a computer should certainly involve lisitng all the PCBs present, and if possible whether that's enoghh to make a working system, if there are any options installed, and so on. 2) Somebody at the musuem 'borrowed' parts to get another incomplete machine going. I feel the problkem is not that it happened, but that it wasn't recorderd properly. I have, alas, come across meuseum workers who treat the machines like part of their own collection and 'borrow;' from the nearest machine, forgetting that htis is going to cause headaches later on. I've also come across museums that go to far the other way and who won't fit any non-origianl parts ot their machines (even if said parts are indentcial to the faulty/missing ones in the machine, and even if said parts could be easily tagged ot indicate they;'re not original and the date they were fitted). -tony