Thanks for the advice from Mary Parr, Hodcarry, Jennifer Nuske, Adrienne
DeArmas, et al.

In December last year we were in Riga and attended the meeting of the
Latvian Museums Association.  One major discussion was on computerizing
their museum records - most museums have only written records. They
wanted to have the same system for the whole country. The question was:
do we make our own, or do we get a commercial one?

If they make their own, they start from scratch in a country where there
are good computer people, but none of them know about museums or have
experience in collections management. They would need months to develop
the programme. It is unrealistic to think they import a contractor (who
pays?) who would go back across a sea (the nearest being to Finland or
Sweden) once finished, with no easy way to ask questions afterwards.
Phone costs are so expensive people need permission to use them, and
have cut off their fax lines; e-mail is not yet wide-spread in their
museum world.

Being the only person from the west - and having worked with museum
documentation - I was asked my opinion. I suggested that they take a
short-cut and find a commercial software, maybe MS Access, having seen
it in operation here in Brno for a country-wide network of selected
collections. Because few museum people in Latvia are computer literate,
and they will have to teach people who enter the records how to use both
the computer and the programme; there will be more chance of finding
some computer literacy in new young people who have some knowledge of a
commercial programme.

I am still not sure what is right for them. What would be the best
answer? The best programme? Suggesting anything MS is not easy; there is
the MS habit of bigger and heavier programmes that go with bigger and
heavier operating systems, requiring new computers that NO museum can
afford.

Any ideas?

Suzanne Nash