[This message has been posted to ARLIS-L and MUSEUM-L. Please excuse any
duplication.]

Dear Friends:

The Castellani Art Museum is planning a resource room for use by
the Niagara University community, area teachers, researchers, and
visitors to the museum. The room will offer access to: the Castellani's
slide collection; a text- and image-base of the museum's inventory; works on
paper and objects from the collection; a text- and image-base of folk arts
materials, including slides, photographs, objects, interviews on tape and in
transcript, and videotapes; reference books relating to the collections; and
electronic resources, including the Underground Railroad CD-ROM produced
in-house, and the Internet. In addition, the room will provide space for
small, ad hoc exhibitions in support of Niagara University courses.

I hope that you can give me some input on two questions.

1) Are you familiar with, or have you planned a similar resource
room? If so, would you be willing to provide details on your project,
and any references in the literature you found useful?

2) We have looked at the requirements for the reference/folk arts
and registrar's databases, and have selected two systems for further
investigation: Inmagic DB/Textworks, and EmbARK. There has already
been some discussion on this ARLIS-L about Inmagic; however, I do not
recall having read anything about EmbARK. Does anyone have any experience
with this system? How does it work for you? The information available from
Digital Arts & Sciences' WWW-site (http://www.digital-collections.com/) makes
EmbARK sound like the greatest thing since sliced bread, but we would
appreciate input from people who have worked with it "in the trenches," so
to speak.

Please reply off-list. If anyone else is interested in this topic, I'll be
happy to share the results of my query.

Thank you for your time!

Amy C. Grasmick
intern, Castellani Art Museum
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