I nearly fell out of my chair when I read about the use of AREV as a
data base. For years AREV was the bain of our existence...I would
*strongly* advise against the use of AREV for a data base if any of you
in the museum world are considering it.
 
I worked with a group of archaeologists for four years and watched them
continually struggle with AREV programming bugs.  Tens of thousands of
dollars were wasted plus more than a year of down time on this program! In
theory AREV has the flexibility and ultimate power of the ideal relational
data base, but I have never seen it demonstrated.  I know of two other
archaeological groups that used AREV for their collections, and they too
are finally dumping this program. For our group the most serious flaw of
AREV is the extreme "user-unfriendliness" of this program. We had one
staff member who had to handle all data requests. The program was so
convoluted that no one else on the staff could complete even the simplest
queries themselves.  You can imagine the bottle-neck that created when you
are dealing with 6 analysts and more than a million lines of data.
 
Unless your organization has the wealth to afford *several* full-time
programmers, look for another relational database such as Paradox. In
this age of computers, I believe that analysts, collection managers, and
archivists should have their data at their finger-tips. This simply was not
possible with AREV.
 
Please enlighten me if I am wrong, but how is AREV used in your organization?
 
--
Carol B. Brandt
Biology Department
277-4392
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