My recommendation is to start by identifying the problem(s) with your current database. What is it about Access that's not meeting your needs? Next identify, in addition to the things you do need, the things you want.
Do you want a quick and easy public interface? Do you want to be able to set it up for OAI-PMH harvesting? Do you want integration with a Getty controlled vocabulary (ULAN or AAT, etc)?
PastPerfect is perfectly acceptably for a historical museum, but not many art museums use it - because it is focused on historical collections, not art. We abandoned it and moved to CollectiveAccess (which is open source - and free) in large part because of the problems with how PastPerfect handled our art (and natural history) collections.
There are plenty of low-cost options that deal well with small collections. You might also look at eHive, Musarch, and possibly even Omeka (which was designed to be online exhibition software but has recently developed some modules to allow more traditional collections management activities). All of these, including PastPerfect and CollectiveAccess have demos available.
Good luck,
Kaia
Kaia Landon
Director
Brigham City Museum of Art & History
On Thursday, July 9, 2015, MUSEUM-L automatic digest system <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Jul 9, 2015, at 1:25 PM, Maggie <[log in to unmask]')">[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> I work for a small non-profit with an art collection of about 2,000 objects. We occasionally loan works, and accession several items each year. We are considering switching our collection management software from Microsoft Access to PastPerfect as an affordable, out-of-the-box solution. I wanted to get some thoughts or tips from people who work with PastPerfect, and see if there are other affordable software recommendations for a small collection.
>
> Thanks!
>
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