A primary responsibility of a museum is the custody of its collections. And for all but the smallest museums, the full details of its collections are beyond the capacity of any single curator. So museums manage massive databases recording every detail about the hundreds of thousands of objects which are in the care of even a moderately sized museum.
These Collections Management Systems cover every activity and process which a museum undertakes upon the objects in its care: their description and preservation; their location and condition; information for future exhibitions and articles; insurance and origin; and much more.
With this role at the centre of the activities of a museum, and because they often stand in for the objects themselves when decisions are made about the running of a museum, the nature of a museum is profoundly affected by the nature of its collections management system, almost as much as by the nature of the objects themselves.
As their Collections Management System helps define their character and purpose, museums are therefore very particular about the exact form of their collections management system, what information is recorded and how it is represented.
The Collection Space project is funded by the Mellon Foundation to build an open-source collections management system which can be used by a broad range of museums. In collaboration with work at the University of Toronto on user interfaces, and at Unversity of California, Berkeley on databases and enterprise integration, CARET will contribute a key middle component of this new collections management system: the ability to configure and tailor this Collections Management System to match the needs of each museum.
All too often, a museum changes its practices to meet the requirements of their software. Through providing a rich but simple means of configuring the Collections Management System, CARET’s contribution to Collection Space will ensure that, instead, the software can be easily changed by local experts to match the requirements of the museums.
