collections software

I know that this thread came up just a couple of months ago, but I will add a plug for the software program we are using. Early this year we switched from Argus to the new Past Perfect software that is distributed by AASLH. We have been delighted not only with its features but also with its ease of use. It comes with the Lexicon built in, has facilities for objects, photos, as well as library and archival materials. For a minimal charge you can also add an imaging function. The staff here love the ease of use. Our Registrar has recently taught several of our summer high school student workers to input data. I believe he spent a grand total of 3 hours explaining the system. Our Director loves the system because of the cost. I believe that we spent approx. $1800. for the whole system (quite a bit less than most museum software).

Patricia McElyea Unless the heart sees Curator of Collections The mind will never see. Arkansas State University Museum

Patricia McElyea schrieb: Dear Patricia, for the German speaking countries IMDAS-PRO is even cheaper than that, because is is offered for only DM 1.500 DM (including - for the single user solution - a data base) and picture facilities, sound and video features. Of course Z39.50, CIMI, Dublin Core, fantastic thesaurus facilities, ICOM-CIDOC fields and many other items . There are also client-server solutions.

Best regards

Christian Mueller-Straten

Verlag Dr. C. Mueller-Straten, Kunzweg 23, D-81243 Muenchen, Tel/Fax: 089-839 690 43, http://WebMuseen.de/VERLAGCMS MAGAZINES AND BOOKS IN MUSEOLOGY (GERMAN/ENGLISH)+ GERMAN THESAURI

San Jose, California 95113 http://www.thetech.org

I know you did not want any more emails on Databases, but I thought you might want to read this.

Laura

My 2 cents worth on this subject. I recently took a look at Access and found that the fields can only hold 255 characters. That is too short for many of my entries. MS Works' database can hold more. Good luck.

Jeffrey Bilderback

There is a memo field in Access that will hold far more than 255 characters. Not sure of the limit. The 255 is an adjustable text field where you can set the exact number of characters you need. It is actually a bit more sophisticated in terms of space saving and access than those programs that don't allow this.

Keep in mind (which you may already do) that Access Memo fields allow up to about 64,000 characters (I'm familiar to an early version, so some facts may have changed). This has the advantage of not setting aside large unused spaces for each record while still allowing a number of pages of notes for fields that may require extensive material. The disadvantage is that although Memo fields can be searched, they can't be indexed or sorted.

Art Harris

Gary Acord schrieb: larger museums MS Access does not seems to be a good idea. A real data base is

This is exactly, what I meant.

If anyone is looking to use Access I would

This is exactly what I meant.

Of course, if

Best regards

Christian Mueller-Straten

Verlag Dr. C. Mueller-Straten, Kunzweg 23, D-81243 Muenchen, Tel/Fax: 089-839 690 43, http://WebMuseen.de/VERLAGCMS MAGAZINES AND BOOKS IN MUSEOLOGY (GERMAN/ENGLISH)+ GERMAN THESAURI

Though our current database is nowhere near that size, I have in the past run with tables of over 100,000 items and multiple relations to other tables in Access with little trouble as long as the machine used has enough memory. (The speed limitations were definitely not legendary in the first two iterations of Access though!!!)

I know several programmers who regularly use the Jet engine from Access as a back end with Visual BASIC for mailing list, fund-raising tracking and other similar files that large as well.

One nice thing about Access 97 is that it is very upwardly mobile. If you store all of your data in Access, it allows you to export to almost any Windows program easily. If you decide you want to 'move up' to SQL Server or some other 'heavy duty' database, the data conversion is almost painless unless you are making significant changes to the data at the same time.

E. L. Wimett Collections/Information Systems Manager Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum

A couple of weeks ago I asked if someone was familiar with Visual dBase (the successor of the good old dBaseIII+ as I was told), but I only received e-mails from colleagues asking me to forward to them the answers I should receive. Unfortunately apparently nobody seems to have any experiences of Visual dBase... Maybe this is the place to ask again if anyone is using this software and what they think about it.

Adriaan Linters

A. Linters scientific director Conservare nv the European Heritage Forum Vlamingstraat 4 B-8560 Wevelgem Flanders-Belgium tel. (+32)56.253373 or 421012 fax (+32)56.417636