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