Over the years I have seen many posts on Museum-L which ask for various types of scheduling software which would be appropriate for a museum environment. As a computer programmer with museum experience, I have often thought that this would be a good product to develop. A few months back I tried to gather interested parties via a Museum-L survey to see if it was worthwhile to launch the development of this product. I have a few comments: First: It is unreasonable to expect any software which can integrate all of the tasks to provide scheduling & booking for museums to cost less than $300-$800 per copy. Sure, you can buy any number of great programs at Egghead software for less than $100.00, but the needs of the museum community are so specialized and varied it would require a large development effort and a great deal of support to make a software program that doesn't cause more problems than it solves. When you figure the hundreds/thousands of hours of development/support that a software developer would have to put into this, selling the product at $100.00 to the highly specialized museum market would be impossible. Also, look at some of the more specialized software programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator or Word Perfect. These will start at around $400 and they serve a much larger market. Second: The sheer diversity of the methods used by each facility would cause any program developed to have so many features and ways of doing things in order to qualify as a non-custom product that it would become very complicated for the end-user to use. Each facility wants to preserve their own method of handling room/staff scheduling and booking and different facilities also have various types of computer equipment. In my earlier questionairre, I had responses from museums that ran older computers and DOS software. In order to satisfy a larger market, anything developed today would have to run on Windows and be network ready. However: In light of this, Freya Ventures is still interested in developing scheduling staffing software which provides a powerful, integrated solution targeted specifically for museums. But in order to do this I either need a group of museums which are interested which would participate in the development and evaluation of the product. I used to work at a science museum and am aware of the various elements of scheduling school groups, field trips, daily programs and staff scheduling. Currently, Freya Ventures produces a program called InfoTerm which displays information on daily program, special events and exhibits via a touch-screen computer. I feel that developing an additional module to this program which handles the administrative tasks would be a good approach as I could then market it as an integrated package that allows the handling and support of this information internally, but also provides platform for getting this information out to the public. Producing the scheduling software as an InfoTerm module also insures it's continued support in the future as the InfoTerm software is under a continuing development effort including upgrades and support. Summary: Send me e-mail saying you are seriously interested in this project. Tell me about the equipment you have, whether you can upgrade to better machines, what type of facility you have and how you currently handle scheduling and how you would like to handle scheduling. Keep it simple for now. If we get serious I will begin developing detailed surveys/proposals for developing the software. If a group of museums can band together and work with me as a team, I can produce the software that all of you so often cry out for on the vast electronic netherworld of Museum-L. I am only posting this offer on Museum-L, so if there are other museums that you know of that are interested in this, give them a call. Tell your friends! Let's get the ball rolling. I am willing to absorb the cost of development, but this won't fly if there isn't enough interest in the project. Just remember: "The good of the many outweighs the needs of the few, or the one." (Spock, circa the future) Mark C. Vang Senior Applications Developer Freya Ventures 2100 Mediterranean Ave. Suite 15 Virginia Beach, VA 23451 (757) 340-0099