You stated that you:
" are beginning to index the records to our archives, slide
collection and Prints and Drawing Collection using either PBS's Procite
or Microsofts' Access"
Sounds like you've gotten conflicting responses.  As someone who has used
both Procite and Access extensively, I would advise you to use Access for
two reasons: (1) it sounds like you will be creating a rather large
database; (2) I'm assuming you are interested in documenting the artists,
photographers, etc.
The big difference between the two programs is that Procite is a "flat-file"
system, while Access is a "relational" system.
In practice, what this means is that your catalog records in Procite are the
equivalent of index cards.  If you have 200 prints by the same artist, that
artist's name will appear 200 times (at the "top" of each record), and you
retrieve the prints associated with that artist by searching the database
for that name.
In a relational system, you create a record for the artist, and link the 200
prints to that record by defining the relationship between the "person"  and
"print" records.  This has two obvious advantages for a system like the one
you are working on:
1. It saves space -- you store the name once, and "link" subsequent records
to it.
2. You can store all sorts of information about the artist (which I'm
assuming you will be interested in) in the artist record, and that
information will be accessible each time you retrieve a record associated
with that artist.
You can also associate that artist with other artists in the creation of
other prints, link her/him to a biography as "subject", etc.
As another list-member noted, Access has gotten quite easy to use.  AND,
last-but-not-least, when your database gets too big or complicated to live
in Access (as has recently happened to us), you can port it to something
like Oracle or SQL server, or ....
All of this is, of course, a gross simplification, but I hope it helps.  And
don't get me wrong, all you Procite-devotees: Procite is great for
bibliographic databases.  It will not only format bibliographies for you in
a variety of standard styles, but will also search your documents and
extract citations. With additional software extensions, it will allow you to
automatically dump citations from on-line databases into your own database.
 As someone on the list noted, it has additional data-entry forms for most
types of library materials.  But it's not a collections-management system.

Jim Fricke
Chief Curator
Experience Music Project
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