Hi,
I've noticed that many museums use FileMaker Pro to develop their own
collection management systems out of. It's cheap, easy to configure,
and runs on Mac or Windows. We here at the UC Berkeley Art
Museum/Pacific Film Archive did just that. We did it because at the
time we could not afford a vendor-supplied database that would allow
all our staff to access it over the network (many commercial systems
required us to buy "seats" or number of allowed users). Another
reason we went this route was that, at the time at least, not many
vendor systems structured the data according to any museum-community
Standard such as the Getty's Categories for the Descriptions of Works
of Art, CIDOC data model, or others. Some used AAT for vocabulary
control; but we also wanted the data itself to be structured
according to a standard. Of course using a standard also gave us a
basic template for how to build our system; use FileMaker and
structure the database around the CDWA model.
I would not recommend this for everyone, and we might make a
different choice in the future, of course it means we're on our own
as far as a museum-peer-support group goes, and we had to develop it
at our own cost, but so far it seems to be working well. No, I own no
stock in Filemaker or the Getty :) Hope this helps, I'd be very
curious to hear what others are doing with "build your own" CMS's and
how many folks are actually doing this. For that matter I'd love to
hear from vendors about new products which utilize more standards or
have different price models. Thanks!
Richard Rinehart
We are still exploring our options with changing the collections management
software here at the Peel Heritage Complex and I would like to know what the
options with generic database software are other than MS Access. The
principal problem with Access in our case is that one of the collections
(Archives) is described using fields in which a great deal of text can be
entered. Staff would need to search in this field but Access has a limit to
the size of indexed fields.
Are there other heritage institutions using a collections database using
generic software which either does not have this problem or has a greater
limit to indexed fields? I have built or re-designed museum collection
databases using Access and I appreciate the flexibility this do-it-yourself
option affords. I used Superbase once in a small medical museum in British
Columbia, but it was before I knew very much about databases so I would not
describe myself as being familiar with that database software.
Thanks,
David Farrell, Collections Assistant
Peel Heritage Complex
9 Wellington Street East
Brampton, ON L6W 1Y1
(905) 791-4055 ext. 2108
(905) 451-4931 fax
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
www.region.peel.on.ca/heritage/index/htm
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--
Richard Rinehart
----------------
Digital Media Director
Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive
@ University of California
www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
----------------
& Board of Directors
Museum Computer Network
www.mcn.edu
