This is a bit of a manifesto but I've read a lot about this subject here
and was compelled to add my 2 cents.

First a bit of background.  The Air Force Museum is the oldest and largest
avaition museum in the world and has been in existence since the '20's.
In the early '80's with the advent of PC's a process was started to
electronically catalogue the collection.  First stop was the
affectionately known "Brown Box" experiment.  PC's that never came out of
the box as no one knew how to program, cart before the horse.  We then, in
partnership with another organization purchased a mini-computer and
contracted for a management package built on Oracle.  We found, as others
have, how difficult it is to convey the specifics to programmers of the
museum business.  Being a programmer myself I feel free to say this.  A
breakdown in communcation between the project leaders and the programmers
resulted in a product that was less than what was required. Not being
involved at this point I can say they made a mess of it.  The product
ended up not being relational, data being entered again and again.  In
1989 I was given responsibility to debug the system, yes me not the
programmers.  As I identified more and more problems two things occured 1)
the product was found to be lacking (understatement) and 2) the decision
was made that we needed to be autonomous, the other organization
controlled the mini.  1991 a team composed of myself (my first eight years
were as a cataloguer and then the added duties of database manager),
another computer specialist, members from the registrars office, archival
office, and the loan administrators (we have a large loan program - 18,000
items on loan).  The team identified processes and requirements for a
management program.  At this point solicitations were made and programs
demo'd and reviewed.  We then, 1994, began the contract process and the
contracting office narrowed it to two Multi Mimsy and Argus, and the
majority of users were most impressed with Mimsy.

Commentary:  We had heard all of the negatives about support and
Willoughby - but the product was built on Oracle, one of the industry
leaders in RDBMS software and related products and was a major selling
point.

As you'll be happy to see now I'll get to the point, sometimes you've got
to see if people are really interested. LOL.   We installed and were
trained in December of 1994.  We have had all the initial fits and starts
of a new program.  Some minor bugs to be removed LAN/WAN equipment to
configur, those kind of things.  The first year has been spent getting
users used to the software and the flow of data entry.  I have been most
impressed with the logical flow of the program, as you know it covers all
the processes of a museum.  The modules have a seamless flow to them that
makes it very user friendly.  An artifact can be catalogued as in depth as
you have information or as basic as nomenclature and donor if thats all
you have.  Most users with basic knowledge can perform complex database
queries within the application and for more knowlegeable users SQL*Plus
and PL*SQL are included in the package.  These last two come in real handy
for cleaning up legacy data. The prior package used the same fields for
different types of data and to move them requires a more robust language
and it makes corrections of data much simplier than a record by record
update.

Support:  I find all the negative statements about their support amazing.
Of course I only have my own contacts to draw on but, people what do you
want - hand holding.  Any problem or question that I have had has been
handled on the fast track.  If support personnel are not available at the
time of the call the service has been handle that day.  What more can you
expect?  If the support can't be handled over the phone then a dial in
connection is made and the support question resolved.  Do you get this
from AOL, the phone company, cable  -- come on -- be there in a four hour
window and they might show up.  There have been some growing pains at
Willoughby, after all it is a niche business that they are in but people
are being added which should help things.  I have to give support a 10.

Summary:  Multi Mimsy is a multi discipline museum software application,
It is very difficult to be all things to all people. As a whole the
package is excellent, built on an Oracle engine which is powerful but user
friendly was a good starting point. The Windows interface is slick and
navigation will be familiar to most users.  As I've said before on a 10
scale I give MM an 8 1/2.

Jerry Baker
LAN/Database Manager
USAF Musuem

The comments and observations are my own an do
not necessarily reflect the views of The US Air Force or
US Government.