At Grand Central Terminal’s Lost and Found headquarters behind the food court on the lower level, manager Michael Nolan and his staff of three are digging into a pile of recently lost things.

Accompanied by the low hum of the lunchtime rush, they are breaking down a shipment of recovered items just delivered from safe boxes in Danbury, Conn., and Poughkeepsie and Wassaic, N.Y.

Since Mr. Nolan, 46, took over as Lost and Found manager six years ago, the overall return rate for lost items at Grand Central Terminal has climbed to 62% (the industry standard hovers at 30%), he said. The return rate for higher-value items such as iPods and cell phones has climbed to 80% under Mr. Nolan’s stewardship, and the return rate for recovered laptops is almost 100%.

A pen-and-paper system of logging lost items was replaced with an electronic database eight years ago. Not until Mr. Nolan instituted a computer matching system, under which inquiries about lost property could be connected to recovered items, did the department see its recovery and return rates soar.

“There’s a lot of anxiety with lost property,” Mr. Nolan said. “People have serious attachments to these things. We take all property recovered seriously, no matter what it is.”

Professor Paul Noguchi, an urban anthropologist at Bucknell University who studies Lost and Found departments at major metropolitan commuter rail lines, says the department at Grand Central Terminal is the “gold standard” in the field. He said Mr. Nolan’s matching database is the leading technology in the Lost and Found industry worldwide.

“It comes as a surprise to many that Japan was not first in the push towards computerization. Japan has switched to a computerized inventory, but Mike Nolan’s is more interactive,” Mr. Noguchi said.

When the MTA police first began documenting lost items in a logbook in the 1990s, the reunion of a lost item with its owner depended on a Lost and Found employee remembering who had inquired after what.

Now, Mr. Nolan’s computer system records two sets of information: A woman’s description of her lost cell phone, for instance, is entered into one database, and a description of a recovered cell phone is logged in another. The program matches inquires about lost property with found items. Other Lost and Found departments, such as New Jersey Transit’s, now use similar matching databases, but Mr. Nolan’s was the first.

Lost items that turn up in Grand Central Terminal or on inbound Metro-North trains are deposited in secure lock boxes in the station that only Mr. Nolan and five service quality inspectors can access. “I won’t even let a police officer in those boxes,” Mr. Nolan said.

Lock boxes at rail yards at the ends of the Metro-North lines collect items found on outbound trains.

The department recovers about 20,000 items annually, twice the number of items recovered five years ago. During the holiday season, about 100 items are recovered daily from Grand Central Terminal — a recovery rate that Mr. Nolan describes as “unheard of.” In comparison, the Lost and Found at New Jersey Transit’s Pennsylvania Station recovers about 10 items a day, according to a customer service representative, Jamie Policastro.

Over the next few months, customer service representatives fielding calls from 1-800-METRO-INFO will be able to log information directly into the Lost and Found database.

In addition to logging the more essential lost items, such as BlackBerries and prescription eyeglasses, representatives will continue the policy of logging anything found or inquired after, such as a 15-pack of toilet paper that sits on a shelf marked “September 2006” waiting to be reclaimed.

All items that end up in Lost and Found — even unclaimed toilet paper — are held for a minimum of 90 days before they are thrown out or donated to charity. Laptop computers are kept at Lost and Found for at least three years. Last year, Lost and Found donated 900 unclaimed cell phones to American soldiers stationed in Iraq.

Comparing different train stations’ Lost and Found departments is difficult because there are no standard logging methods. “One Lost and Found counts a lost bag as one item, while another might count its contents as separate items,” Mr. Noguchi said. But he notes an optimism in the American Lost and Found system that is lacking in some other countries. In Japan’s Tokyo Station, for example, the name of the Lost and Found department translates as “a place where lost articles are stored,” Mr. Noguchi said.

“It sounds rather neutral: no optimism, no pessimism,” Mr. Noguchi said. He says the American term “Lost and Found” may imply more confidence about the chance of recovering one’s missing belongings. Mr. Nolan says he likes to think so.