The Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs has commissioned the Conservation Institute of National Antiquities (RIK) to carry out a survey of the current status of museum storage rooms all over the country. The method used was a physical inventory of a large number of museum storage rooms and use of a relational database with object-oriented tools, for storing and processing all the information gathered. The present condition of the collection in every storage room, correlated with its condition when first moved into the storage room, was used as one of the parameters to evaluate the capacity of the storage room to preserve the heritage. The result is that more than 40 percent of local museum's storage rooms and 20 percent of regional and central museums'storage rooms are considered to be unacceptable.