Accession

The record created at accession (artist, title, date, materials, location, value, condition, maintenance needs) is the backbone of everything that follows. Decades later, it's often the only authoritative account of where a work came from and what the artist intended.

Many civic collections grew informally, through gifts and one-off projects, without a real accession process. That's usually why a city can't say with confidence how many artworks it owns: nothing was ever formally counted in.