An instrument lent to a museum, a foundation, or a performer is recorded with a precision that the original purchase rarely matched. The loan agreement names the lender, the borrower, the instrument, the period, the conditions, and any insurance or maintenance arrangements. The agreement is held by both parties; the relevant institutional file is, in most cases, accessible to scholars and to a wider audience than the lender consented to at the time.

The institutional record extends to the exhibition catalogue, the performance programme, the press coverage, and the acknowledgements that follow. The lender is named in each, with such description as has been agreed; the instrument is described in such detail as the scholarship requires. The catalogue and programme survive; the press coverage is indexed; the cumulative record of the loan is more durable than the loan itself.

Where the loan is to a performer rather than an exhibition, the visibility is rather different. The performer carries the instrument to recitals, to recordings, and to broadcasts. Each is mentioned in the programme, in the sleeve notes, in the broadcast credits. The named lender becomes, in effect, a recurring figure in the performer's career, in places the lender did not, at the moment of the loan, consider.

Foundation structures complicate this in their own way. A foundation that holds an instrument lends it under its own filings; the trustees of the foundation, the patron behind it, the donors who supported it, and the performer who plays the instrument, are all matters of the foundation's published record. The foundation's annual report, its accounts, and the press coverage of its work, accumulate around the original loan.

The work in this category is rarely about preventing the loan or the publicity, both of which are part of the cultural purpose of historic instruments. It is about considered handling of the loan agreement, the description of the lender, the acknowledgement on the programme, and the longer-term presence of the lender's name in the catalogues, reviews, and biographical references that build up around the performer and the piece.