I had replied to the query offline, also recommending Filemaker (with
similar cautions about the do-it-yourself approach. I used it a lot
and found it flexible, fast, and reliable. I also found that
Filemaker's ability to index fields longer than 256 characters made
life a lot easier for many things. It is an exceptional staff member
who can cram an object description, conservation assessment, or
exhibit label text into 256 characters. these are not principal
search fields, but it is handy for the unskilled to be able to search
them quickly and easily.
Filemaker is not an ideal solution for every situation, but it is a
far-too-often overlooked alternative to Access.
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
--
---------------------------------------------------------------
Guy Hermann
Mystic, Connecticut
Home: 860-536-2994
Office: 617-437-6262
Cell phone: 860-857-7363 (leave voice mail)
