Hi David and list,
Interesting question. I'm unaware of any general trend away from
vendor-supplied systems; it seems to me that many are offering
increasingly standards-aware ways of handling museum information, and
that those systems can do a really excellent job in many
institutional settings (from what I hear).
In our case, in-house development using FileMaker Pro and Server made
sense due to a convergence of functional needs as a university
museum; minimal budget for installation, licensing, or support; and
(truth be told) as our one technical person, my familiarity with the
Mac environment and the fact that our staff and public machines all
are Macs. After ruling out such tools as 4D and FoxPro (and more
recently, OpenBase, FrontBase, MySQL...) due to concern about
long-term systems maintainability across unforeseen staff
transitions, FileMaker was it.
Local evaluations of case-specific sets of needs, opportunities,
constraints, and worries drive many such decisions, whether to
license an off-the-shelf system or to develop one in-house. More
important than specific software is the need to make whatever one
builds (or buys) as able as possible to support standards-based
information management, and to be sure that it can export all the
information it contains when the inevitable day comes and it's time
to migrate to a new system.
my 2 cents,
Rob
At 9:28 -0400 4/8/04, David Farrell wrote:
...Is there a trend towards abandoning proprietary collections
management software? And why was Filwmaker chosen and not Access?
David Farrell, Collections Assistant
Peel Heritage Complex
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_________________________________________________________________
Rob Lancefield [email protected] Wesleyan University
Registrar of Collections / Manager of Museum Information Services
Davison Art Center www.wesleyan.edu/dac
301 High Street, Middletown CT 06459 USA tel. 860.685.2965
Board of Directors, Museum Computer Network www.mcn.edu
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