Hi Emma, We use STARMuseums, developed by Cuadra Associates (now Lucidea - parent company) at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The software was delivered with a Loans Management module (both Incoming and Outgoing).
Our Exhibits Registrar is responsible for managing all incoming loans (including making the formal loan requests, preparing the legal paperwork, and entering the information in STAR). The process in STAR begins with creating an Incoming Loan Request Record. The information recorded includes a loan number (tracking field), the lender (which needs to be entered in the Rolodex (people / organization) database if a record doesn't already exist), the Exhibit that the loan request is associated with, the dates required, the art / artifacts being requested, insurance and shipping information, and a contact log field to detail the date and type of contact made with representatives of the lender. Once the lending institution has responded to the request, the record can be updated with any new information (usually that's just whether they have approved lending particular items). We could, but don't, use STAR to generate the legal paperwork. The legal document already exists, so it didn't make much sense to recreate it in STAR. Once approval has been given by the lending institution (and the art and artifacts in the request have been given a status of YES - meaning they've been approved), we are able to create catalogue records for incoming loans. These records live in the collection database alongside art and artifacts owned by Glenbow. When creating the object records, a "picklist" is generated based on any incoming loan record that has items identified as being approved (i.e. this prevents someone from creating an object record for a request or a specific item that has been denied). Information like the legal owner of the object, etc. etc. are taken from the loan record, additional information related to the description of the object itself may be entered at this time. We don't catalogue loaned items in nearly the detail that we would catalogue our own pieces, however, we try to enter information that would be useful to our conservation, design and production departments. Once that process is complete we are able to assign a unique number to the object(s) - short term loans get a TL (temporary loan number), long term get an EL number (extended loan). STAR autogenerates the number based on the year and the record number in the system - i.e. if it's the first loan of 2016 it would be TL16.1. >From there we can link loan object records to the exhibit, conservation can >create a treatment record (if they have been given permission to work on the >object), etc. When the exhibit comes down and the loan is ready to be >returned, there is a tie in with the Shipping Module to send the object back >to the lender. To date, we do not do any clean-up / archiving of loaned object records, although I suppose that might be something to discuss. Lastly, we do not enter travelling / canned exhibits that are loaned to us. We have considered this, but unless they were small exhibits it's just more workload than we have the manpower to deal with. Cathy Cathy Herr Computer Support Specialist, Collections [email protected] 130 9 Avenue SE Calgary, Alberta T2G 0P3 D 403 268 4159 F 403 262 6569 glenbow.org -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Emma Jones Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2015 10:45 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [MCN-L] Loans in your CMS Hi everyone I was wondering if there was anyone out there who would be willing to share hoe you process and record incoming loans in your collection management system? We are currently reviewing our practices and procedures and would like to know what other organizations do. We use XG here at the Australian War Memorial and utilize the entry, object and loans modules to manage all of our loans. Please feel free to reply to me off list or on this thread. Thanks! [AWM Logo not displayed in text email] ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ This message may contain confidential information and is intended only for its recipient(s). If you have received this email by error, please delete this e-mail from your system and notify the sender immediately. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure. E-mail information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late, be incomplete, or contain viruses. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ 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: [email protected] To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://mcn.edu/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l The MCN-L archives can be found at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
