It was late last night and I had an afterthought to my posting on software.
My vehemence, BTW, comes from having recently visited a museum which had
invested ten years in a vendor-system which now sits on the shelf, and whose
data they apparently cannot extract. The vendor, of course, is no longer
with us.  What a waste!

In any case, what I didn't emphasize enough is that flexibility is paramount
in a field where the technology changes so rapidly.  Centralized
bureaucratic systems at any scale are not generally able to change direction
quickly, which almost ensures that within five years they are using
technology, hard and soft, which is less than optimum, to put it mildly.

The best system today, whether mine or somebody else's, will on first
principles probably not be the best solution in five years.  The house
really does need to get rebuilt, or at least seriously remodelled, that
often.  Museums will be better able to take advantage of new technologies if
they minimize their dependency on vendor platforms and use them as starting
points, rather than final solutions.  I know that many must be doing this,
but those aren't the ones that I am seeing.
Joe Nagel (KUSTOS Inc.)
2961 Semiahmoo Trail
Surrey, B.C.  V4P 1H4
604-531-6879, 604-594-2628 (FAX)