Hi Amanda: Congratulations! I am rather quite envious that you won't have a bunch of cleanup and nasty legacy data to deal with!
How large do you think your museum will ultimately end up? Scale can be a determining factor in which software you choose. For instance - I love how well KE Software's EMu handles multimedia, images, and object information. With 30K objects, and a whole mess of artists and donors and other personal information to keep track of, it's a good solution for us. But for a place that only has 3000 objects, EMu's a bit overkill. (but if you do plan on having a large collection, I do highly recommend EMu) Will you be presenting your collections and programs on the web as well? Will you be sharing your data with other groups, so will need to export it into various formats? Oh, one thing I might mention about collections software, specifically in the "steer away from" category... A lot of museums recognize that theirs is a unique collection, so often fall into the trap of thinking they need unique software and design their own collections management software (CMS). Unfortunately, one of the major pitfalls that this causes is inoperability between systems if you're trying to share your data. Also, the maintaining and knowledge of such systems often relies on institutional memory (ensuring that 20 years from now, your poor registrar is going to be complaining about that historical data and wondering how this weird software came into being). Most good CMS developers can customise the software to your specifications, while maintaining the backbone of the database structure and its flexibility. And I can't tell you how grateful I am to have software support always available. In the long run, the license fees are well worth the preservation of my sanity (what's left of it anyway...), the program's flexibility, and it is cost-effective when staff time is taken into account. Ok, off of my soapbox now! Perian Sully Collection Database & Records Administrator Judah L. Magnes Museum 2911 Russell St. Berkeley, CA 94705 510-549-6950 x 335 http://www.magnes.org Contributor, http://www.musematic.org -----Original Message----- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Amanda Birnstengel Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2007 7:08 AM To: mcn-l at mcn.edu Subject: [MCN-L] Computer systems for a new museum Hi everyone, I am helping to start a new museum and am looking at computer software for several functions. I would like to pose a general question. Our IS staff will be small, and we are interested in having our data between systems integrated as much as possible. We will be a global musical instrument museum and will use a large amount of AV in our galleries, such as audio and visual files. If you had the luxury of not needing to convert a bunch of historical data, and not having legacy programs to deal with, what computer programs would you recommend for: Financial accounting Membership/fundraising Ticketing Collection Management Digital Asset Management And are there any systems you would definitely warn me away from? Thank you all for your input! Amanda Birnstengel Operations Manager MIM- The World's First Global Musical Instrument Museum 84 S. 10th Street Suite 450 Minneapolis, MN 55403 612-746-2070 main line 612-746-2072 direct dial amanda.birnstengel at themim.org www.themim.org _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l
