>We are addressing some concerns regarding our collections management >system. Something that has become clear is that our staff is not in >agreement as to what a CMS is and what it should do.
I'd think about the problem a little more broadly. The long view answer is that it doesn't matter where it lives, as long as it lives somewhere. If everyone agrees that it needs to be stored, there are a couple of different ways to approach the problem and you make the mental tradeoffs of short-term need and internal behavior vs. long-term scale and potential use. At one end of the continuum, you just have databases of stuff. Your authoritive records of information in the organization. The development department is probably authoritive about donors and members (people that matter to the org). Visitor services is probably authoritive about programmatic transactions -- ticketing, class registrations, etc. Your collections management system is probably the most authoritive record of the collection itself (if we're disagree on this point, we've got a deeper problem... ;) Your goal at this point is to simply make sure stuff is getting stored. The next point along the path is where secondary information starts to become important. It's easy to start associating label copy, additional images, exhibit text, podcasts, publications, etc and hang that off of the collections management system. Your goal here is to make it easy for end users to find the stuff associated with objects. The problem you quickly run into is an issue of scale and specialization. You may start to realize that not one answer fits all your needs -- you may add a digital asset management system to take on some of the burden that had been falling to your collections management system, for example. By this point, it's become very clear that meta-data is every bit as important as the information itself. And, your goal here is to let each system do what it does best. So now that you've built a bunch of specialized stuff and have decent enough meta-data, you start to *really* concentrate on is providing linkages between stuff and inferring information. You have systems that understand how to translate or pull a subset of relevant information from another system and present that to the end-user. A good example is some of the work that Koven Smith is doing at the Met that was presented at MCN. I can think of a few other data points in the continuum, but I want to circle back to your original question -- should we use our CMS for this extra stuff. I'd answer, why not? If it's the easiest path forward that you have and it gets people in the habit of thinking of multiple kinds of information, then it's a good solution. At the same time, think about the tradeoffs in your long-term view -- where do you hope to be in 5 years -- and if this presents a good baby step or if you need to take a few steps forward at this point. -bw. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Bruce Wyman, Director of Technology Denver Art Museum / 100 W 14th Ave. Pkwy, Denver, CO 80204 office: 720.913.0159 / fax: 720.913.0002 <bwyman at denverartmuseum.org>
