Art is the most documented asset class private people hold. Each significant work has a provenance, and the provenance is part of the work in a way that is almost unique to this market. The auction record is public. The catalogue raisonné, where one exists, is consultable in libraries and online. The conservator's report follows the work between owners. The exhibition history is published. The insurance schedules and loan agreements complete the documentation.

For the collector, the consequence is that a collection is, in a real sense, a public biography. The acquisitions are recorded. The deaccessions are recorded. The loans to public institutions are credited. The works lent to private exhibitions appear in catalogues that survive the exhibition. A capable observer can, with care, reconstruct a collector's holdings even where the collector has been studiously private.

The desk's infrastructure covers this thoroughly because the art market is one of the most actively indexed of any private market. Auction databases, catalogue raisonné archives, conservation records, exhibition catalogues, museum loan databases, the trade press that follows significant transactions: all are continuous sources. Detection systems run against new entries in any of them under the names connected to a client.

Cross-referencing produces the connections that any single record cannot. A work named in one catalogue under one collector's name is matched, through provenance, against earlier and later catalogues; the collector's name on one auction record is connected to the entities through which they appear in another; the conservator named on a report is, often, the route through which two anonymously held works are connected to a single collection.

Manual review is particularly important in art because the meaning of an entry depends on context that machines cannot supply: the prestige of the institution that exhibited the work, the editorial weight of the publication that wrote about it, the practical significance of the conservator who handled it, the strategic implication of a particular dealer or auction house being named alongside the collector. The team makes those calls.

The work runs against the records that surround the collection, not the collection itself. A serious collection should be known to those who need to know it and as private as it can reasonably be from those who do not. The records are brought, through the appropriate channels, to a position that reflects this.