How we work

There are five steps and every one of them is about the collection. The size of the building, the visitor numbers and the loudness of a name leave the step untouched; a museum with a queue in the street may stand below a neighbour few have heard of. The step follows the collection: what the rooms gain, the step gains, while the frequency of press notices moves it nowhere.

world-class

In the same rank as the world's leading museums.

outstanding

A strong collection: worth setting aside a day for.

significant

There are things here worth seeing.

for enthusiasts

Of interest to those already drawn to the subject.

niche

Valuable to a narrow circle, without wider recognition.

Four marks awarded on top of the scale, which do not change the step: they name a property the scale cannot express. A mark that cannot be justified by our own verified entry is not awarded.

underrated

The collection is stronger than its reputation: fewer people know it than it deserves

one of a kind

The collection has no counterpart — not in the country, not anywhere

read first

Without reading beforehand the collection reads as ornament; with it, the whole thing opens

quiet here

No crowds: you can look at your own pace and on your own

Quoted judgements

There are three quoted judgements on a museum and they are of three kinds: praise, description, criticism. Each carries the author's name, the publication, the year and the page. We put no more than three to a museum; three praises in a row we do not put either — three praises in a row make a shop window.

Baedeker's star

In Baedeker the star stood beside the object itself, and with us it stands there too — beside the single thing worth coming for even if nothing else can be managed. The same star heads the section “What to see”.

Every class carries its own date

Hours, price, address and access are checked separately, and each class carries its own date and its own source. At the foot of the entry stands the oldest of them: a work of reference is measured by its worst datum.

Revision intervals

Exhibitions are revisited weekly, hours quarterly, the address once a year. Anything past its interval marks itself and joins the queue of work.

Further reading

Where a book has been written about a collection we name it with its imprint and with the number of the edition, which can be copied at one touch.

Photographs

Under each stand the author's name and the licence; we take only the free licences of Wikimedia Commons, and we leave FAL and CC SA 1.0 alone, because we cannot vouch for them to anyone who reprints us.

The most reliable source is a letter from the museum or a conversation with it, then the museum's own site, then open sources. Hours, price, address, the make-up of the collection and access are checked separately, and each class carries its own date; it stands in the entry beside what it was checked against, so that in one entry the hours may be yesterday's and the price a month old. Each class is revisited on its own schedule: exhibitions weekly, hours quarterly, the address once a year. Hours and prices age faster than the rest, and anything older than three months marks itself and joins the queue of work.

There are no visitor reviews here. There are plenty of them everywhere, and they speak of the mood of whoever came, whereas what we need is a judgement of the collection; in their place we give the words of those whose name means something in this museum's field, with the publication and the year. Nor is there paid placement: neither a place in the list nor a step of the scale can be bought, and that is the one thing we promise in advance.

A catalogue raisonné is the complete catalogue of a collection, in which every object holds the same place in the description, with its own number and its own date. Such catalogues take years and are most often compiled alone; our entries are built the same way, which is why they share one set of fields and one order. Our measure we take from those who compile them: we write to museums, read inventories of holdings, keep up a correspondence with the compilers.

The catalogue is kept by a small circle whose names we do not disclose; the project is answered for by Michael Grinzaid. The selection, the step and every judgement here belong to a person with a name; there is no “editorial board” behind them. What a museum tells us is received with attention, and on matters of fact a letter and the museum's own site are our highest authority, but the decision stays with us: a museum cannot raise its own step, remove a critical judgement or require that we strike out a line about what it lacks.

Write to us — we will correct it and set a new date of checking. We answer for every figure and every date on these pages, and a mistake that has been pointed out costs less than one nobody noticed.

Russian, English, Dutch and French stand equal here: none of them is “the main one”. To translate a page is not to translate its words — each language has its own quoted judgements, its own comparisons and its own voice. A museum's own name in its own language is never translated.