Forgive me if someone has asked this before, but WHY doesn't some
vendor build a collections management system using one of the major
relational databases? That way, when the company dies because the
museum market is too small to support more than one company, the
database and support for it will still be there. We have built our
own on Informix because we couldn't afford Willoughby (thank
heavens!) and were already using Informix for our archaeological
site file and archival databases--and while ours is not perfect and
doesn't have wonderful graphical screens, it's still there and we
can change it any time we like. But we'd gladly have bought a system
built on Informix if one had been available at the time, because we
had already justified the significant cost of the basic database
system.

Pat Galloway
MS Dept. of Archives and History