Catherine,

A brief response on behalf of the National Gallery of Canada - if we can help further, feel free to telephone me.

Greg

Greg Spurgeon
Head, Art Documentation & Storage / Chef, documentation & d'entreposage d'oeuvres d'art
Registration / Enregistrement
National Gallery of Canada / Musée des beaux-arts du Canada
380 Sussex Drive / 380, promenade Sussex
P.O. Box 427, Station A / C.P. 427, Succursale A
Ottawa, Ontario
CANADA  K1N9N4

tel: 613-990-0482  fax: 613-990-8689  email: [log in to unmask]

>>> Catherine Ricciardelli <[log in to unmask]> 12/01/98 03:21pm >>>
Please excuse the cross posting to Museum-L and the RC-AAM list.  Your input would be greatly appreciated.  


Currently, we are in the process of writing a proposal to purchase a collections management system for The Minneapolis Institute of Arts.  Questions have been raised by our selection committee concerning the various systems currently in use, how they are maintained and utilized by different museums throughout the country.  Thus my email to you...

If you could please take a moment to look over the following questions and supply a brief answer, I would be grateful (so would our committee).  

Thank you in advance for your help!  I appreciate the time and effort you are able to put toward answering my queries.

1. What collections management system does your museum currently use? 

MultiMimsy 2000 (Willoughby Associates) online in Feb 1998

2.  Does the curatorial staff at your museum use the collections management system?  How?

Yes, over 100 staff in divisions throughout the museum, including the curatorial staff,  have been trained in the use of the system and have access at their desktop workstations 

Curatorial staff currently have read-only access (they contribute data offline which is input by the Registrar's office on their behalf) but we are in the early stages of training staff in other divisions and altering our data capture procedures to distribute write access more broadly throughout the museum (so that the Registrar's office will not be an information bottleneck) - staff in the Exhibitions division are the first we are bringing online with controlled write access to select modules of the system (curatorial staff will ultimately be given such access too)

3.  Do you have a collections management system administrator devoted solely to the system?  Or, is someone else in you department taking on the responsibilities, in addition to their normal duties?

Yes, at the time of acquisition of the system we hired a 4-day-a-week Data Base Administration (as a new member of our 5-person Information Technology Systems support staff) to provide technical support, report writing expertise, etc.

All content-related management of the collection management system (standards, authorities, decisions regarding use of modules and fields, new programs of data entry, quality control, etc.) remain my responsibility as Associate Registrar, Collections

4.  What are the qualifications of the person in charge of your collections management system, experience and/or expertise?

Associate Registrar, Collections - Art Historical background in combination with extensive experience in registration functions and information systems and standards, specifically collections management systems

Data Base Administrator - technical expertise in information technology systems, with past experience in relevant database management systems (eg. Oracle) and software packages, including their use and programming

5.  How did you handle the process of data entry?

See also question 2 - centred in the Registrar's Office at this stage of implementation, but will be managed on a distributed "worknet" model in future, with controlled write access to select system modules for staff in different divisisions

6.  What do you like about your current system?

MultiMimsy 2000 is, in my opinion, the most sophisticated of the off-the-shelf collections management systems currently available - the structure, functionality, and navigation tools integral to MultiMimsy 2000 provide the potential to assemble the data captured in the course of performing  the daily operational activities of the museum into a rich information resource which is greater than the sum of its parts

7.  What do you dislike about your current system?

The report writer Willougby chose to associate with MultiMimsy 2000 is Borland ReportSmith - it has some limitations in regard to manipulating some information elements in a data structure as complex as that of MM2000 - ultimately these limitations lead to the necessity for custom solutions for some report outputs

Again, thank you for your assistance in this matter!

Sincerely,


Brian M. Kraft
Associate Registrar
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts
2400 South Third Avenue
Minneapolis, MN  55404

Voice: (612) 870-3146   Fax: (612) 870-3121