Hello everyone,

I am interested in hearing from those of you out there who use collections management systems. I am in the process of gathering information regarding collections management systems so that we can make an informed decision when the time comes to purchase one.

If you use one within your organization, I'd appreciate the following:
1. Which system are you using?
2. Is the system web-based or software based?
3. Does the system allow your collection to be published to the web?
4. How much does the system cost?
5. What do you like about the system?
6. What are some system drawbacks?
7. Any other information

Please try to answer in a similar format so I can easily compile the information.

Thanks very much,
Steve Piwowarski

My system is not digital. Cost is very little, and I can publish it (but not on the web) with a Xerox machine, but I really don't want to, so I don't care. It's not the general public's business. It is ink and paper based, although I do run through a bit of graphite as well. I don't like being considered a Luddite for choosing this in preference to all those digital systems out there, it was a rational consideration. I do like just about everything else about it. It is cheap, flexible, requires no programming knowledge or learning to manipulate software, makes use of a lot of free resources like old file cabinets which are easy to get these days for picking them up, and the information can be organized based on your own imagination and preferences to suit your own requirements, rather than being forced into some programmer's chosen structure. What I like most is it takes me minimal time to use it and no time to train to use it, since I've been managing information in nondigital formats for decades now. Hard to beat it for bang for the buck and ease........

Past Perfect and other alternates have been discussed at length here: http://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=22745&p=220781&hilit=Past+perfect#p220781

Wesley

Thanks Wesley, but that discussion is dealing with the wrong aspect of Past Perfect. That discussion is about membership management while this discussion is focused on collections management.

Thanks for the lead though.

Steve

My 1st question is what collection are you managing?

Your Rolling Stock?

Your Paper Archives?

Your Track Spikes?

They all need to be managed but it different ways.

-Hudson

Hudson,

It is my understanding that when a museum choses a CMS it should not apply to just a portion of its collection. In other words, in a perfect world, it should contain the complete inventory of items that are accessioned by the museum.
I believe that a good CMS would not keep track of photographs but ignore rolling stock or payrolls. In other words, the system should be able encompass your entire collection, not just random parts of it.
If you have experience with a system, please share.

Dave,

Thanks for your feedback. The overwhelming cost of many CMS on a small museum is duly noted. Many museums keep a paper record just in case their computer system, or the cloud, or whatever just decides to go away one day. A hard copy register seems like a good plan. I like the idea of having a permanent written record as a backup to any digital media. As I see it, the main reason we want to store our collections digitally is to share them with the widest possible audience. It is for this reason that even though I haven't seen DaVinci's Mona Lisa, I have seen the Mona Lisa. My hope is that a good CMS should be able to accomplish this in a similar way for all museums.

Take care,
Steve

Our museum is a happy user of PastPerfect with over 150,000 catalog records in the database ranging from individual letters to vehicles. We find their customer service very helpful and responsive. It is a software based system.

The latest version allows catalog listing and searching on the web which is hosted by PP on their servers; however there is a fee structure for every 10,000 items. You have the capability of selecting which individual record you select for this service. We have listed all of our library records on the web whereas we have few "object" records becauase of data inconsistency.

PP allows the directly linking of images and documents to individual records which can lead to a strain on your storage systems. Being overly conservative, we regularly back up the database every night. Occasionally, staff will burn to a tumb drive which is taken offsite. Our IT person is looking into a cloud based back up.

Collection Management Systems require consistency in your data entry. Moving forward, it is highly recommended to have proceedures and guidlines in place BEFORE entries are made AND train every individual user.

Like anything, there are costs associated with implementing and mainting a CMS. Rather than seeing these costs as expenses, the organization should view as an long term investment for your collection.

Ken Middlebrook
Curator of Collections
History San Jose

In my experience, a lot of such museum CMS systems are marketed much more towards the much larger museums--say, for example, the State Museum of Pennsyltucky or the Big City Museum of Art. These are places that can reasonably expect to have a thousand-plus items from multiple genres on display and 10,000+ items in storage as well as a library, an archive, various endowments and funding streams to track, paid and volunteer staffing issues, etc.

This is excellent for some place like the California State RR Museum, Steamtown NHS, or the RR Museum of Pa. But for a place with ten pieces of rolling stock, a closet full of books, and a budget run on Quicken on a volunteer's computer, it's ridiculous overkill. They're going to be giving you things to do that you haven't even thought about yet, like asking you to document the known history of the piece prior to acquisition.

If we approach this for long and far enough, it ends up being a discussion about "professionalism" in the rail preservation avocation, and how much of it is productive process versus tedious drivel at the level of a particular operation.

I don't understand how its "ridiculous overkill" to document the known history of a piece! And if you are trying to run a 'museum' or 'heritage railroad' etc and you haven't even thought about it yet.... that's pretty sad.

Even a very small museum is going to quickly end up with a lot of artifacts. Then people start bringing things in....a box of train orders and a couple lanterns. Old switch stand. RR locks. Old narrow gauge speeder. Within no time flat no one place or person has a clue what has been donated, or what the history of the item is, or anything. Something like PP may be overkill or hard to even attain for a small operation, but you can certainly put it on a spreadsheet or even paper records. Then that lantern can go from a dusty ol piece of crap, to the one that Conductor Jack Slack used on his trains from 1934 to his retirement and he even carried it on Roosevelt's funeral train.

Too many of us expect a pile of junk to be relevant to anyone who sees it, which is not realistic. We need to WORK at making it relevant, documenting what we have, etc.

Everyone raise their hands who have had parts of their collection go 'stale' because the old timer running the joint died, never bothered to write it down, it was all in his head and that was good enough for him. For many artifacts the most precious part IS the history, and sadly, all too often, that history vanishes and can never be recovered.

It's not "ridiculous overkill" to document the history of artifacts.

It's "ridiculous overkill" to spend hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars and maybe annual fees, and many training and installation hours, to "do" what might just as easily be done with spreadsheet, database, and/or word processing software that may already exist on your computer (and is available as open-source "freeware").

Now, yes, there's a certain "you get what you pay for" factor involved. Just like a lawyer will ask you pertinent questions about your intentions for a will that you might not think of in a "do it yourself" will ("What do you want to have happen if every one of your chosen heirs dies first?"), a CMS package will bring things to your table that you probably never thought of doing, like simply documenting how said artifacts got into the collection in the first place, or whether to maintain collections as separate collections as they were bequeathed or simply merged into a common lot of books/photos/artifacts.

But if you realistically don't have the volunteer base, manpower, expertise, or budget to acquire and properly make full use of such a system--and many of us don't, to be honest--then it's like spending lots of money for a semi trailer when you only needed a pickup truck a couple times a year.

If your group or location has become big enough to retain a paid director or manager, then you're probably at the level where getting CMS is a no-brainer. If you're just a small NRHS chapter with a station, a caboose, and a shelfload of books and a room of artifacts on display, maybe not.

Hi Guys,

While I appreciate the philosophical discourse on CMS thoroughly, could you please move your posts to a new thead? If you look at my original inquirye, you'll find that I asked people to answer a very specific group of questions. I'd like to avoid this thread drift.

Thanks,
Steve

Not to sound snide or whatever about it, but in all probability rather few of us ARE using such CMS, and the ones that are are too busy to chat here, or have some bureaucratic "gag order" not to discuss such stuff and/or are only allowed to let specified people comment (and ones who won't see this thread).

I have personal knowledge of three users of PastPerfect, but I can't comment for them and don't have the info even if I could.

Hi,

Your points are all well taken. Given the "constraints" of my original question, it really would be neccessary to have personal experience using a CMS! I am not opposed to the other discussion, I'd just like to see it become it's own thread dealing with philosophies on employing CMS in railway museums. In this way, we can have more interesting and useful topics on rypn.

Steve

1. Which system are you using?
Past Perfect

2. Is the system web-based or software based?
Our license is software based.

3. Does the system allow your collection to be published to the web?
I do not know.

4. How much does the system cost?
Bought more than 10 years ago.

5. What do you like about the system?
Easy to catalog and research items.
You can search on a variety of keywords.
Photos are easily retrieved for use in publications etc.

6. What are some system drawbacks?
Personnel resources needed to catalog a collection of 50+ years and growing.
Maintaining a standard protocol (vocabulary/glossary) of terms and descriptions.

7. Any other information
We have been generally pleased with Past Perfect to catalog our collections.

Wesley

It's funny. I actually just got started setting up a Google spreadsheet to be version 1.0 of the CRHS's Collection Management system.

It's not perfect. Some purpose built software would be much better, however, I was just reading a wise article today about not waiting for "perfect" to do something to get started.

So I said screw it, and setup a spreadsheet to get going.

Down the road, we can iterate into something better, but it was time to stop holding up projects waiting for software perfection.

If you're curious, here's a copy I've made public.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0