Keeping track of more than 18 million items is no easy task.
The Australian Museum has been digitising its vast collection of natural history specimens and cultural objects since the 1990s, but is less than halfway through the task.
Labor's arts spokesman Walt Secord accused the NSW government of failing to properly fund the cataloguing and documenting of items in the museum's collection.
Secord said the Auditor-General had found that 9.6 million items were unidentified and not properly recorded: "Some of them were more than 190 years old – and the collection is growing by 60,000 items a year. This project is urgent.
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"It would be heartbreaking for these items to be lost or left undiscovered in the archives," he said.
But Arts Minister Troy Grant has hit back at the criticism.
"Every year for almost 10 years the Australian Museum requested funding from the Labor government to digitise their collection," he said. "Each were denied, so it is incredibly rich for Mr Secord to turn around and call the kettle black."
Prior to the introduction of digital databases in the 1990s, the museum's collection was recorded in journals with handwritten labels.
Grant said the museum devised a project to record its collection with the assistance of more than 1000 volunteers: "This program has been very successful and has now been adopted by more than 20 key cultural institutions around the world including the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington DC."
The Australian Museum was rocked by the theft of thousands of items from its collection between 1998 and 2002 by former pest controller Hendrikus van Leeuwen, who was jailed in 2007 after a corruption inquiry by the ICAC.
Both sides of politics appear to have rebuffed the museum's request for funding specifically to increase the speed of the digitisation project.
Museum spokesman Rohan Astley said the museum had made unsuccessful bids for funding since the early 2000s and had asked the current NSW government for $40 million for digitisation, collection cataloguing and barcoding.
"Without specific additional funding, the AM estimates that it will take 12 years at the current rate to record some 700,000 collection lots, a 'lot' could have from 10 to 100 items in it – for example a jar of flies," he said.
The museum will also submit a proposal to the NSW government in December for a major redevelopment of its site.
Mr Astley declined to offer details of the cost or design of the new buildings on land bounded by William and Yurong streets.
The museum's annual report suggests the building project will involve a "complete physical transformation" and will house temporary exhibition spaces, permanent galleries and education and science facilities.