Collections Managers can find articles, news and interviews on museum and archive collections management, and museum collections management software.
Illuminating the Archives M+, a new museum in Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District, has set out to become one of the world's largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture and has spent the last several years collecting objects from around the globe. In addition to artworks and objects, M+ also acquires archives. Kevin [...]
How the IIIF Image Retrieval Protocol Enhances Your Users’ ExperienceWhat is IIIF?The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a set of specifications for interoperable functionality in digital image repositories. Designed by and for the cultural heritage community, it improves user access to images and makes it easier to create rich collection websites with advanced media [...]
The Saint Louis Art Museum is home to an encyclopedic collection of over 34,000 works of art, with seven curatorial departments, a robust team of registrars, and a newly-formed digital assets department. In 2017, with a digital strategy in place and a new website in development, SLAM began a new process to provide more object [...]
Cataloguing Time Based Media The City of Düsseldorf established the inter media art institute (imai Foundation) in 2006 as an archive to care for an acquired video collection. The archive contains around 3,000 works of Time Based Media art, and provides context to the history of Time Based Media from the 1970s through today. [...]
Tracking object details is an essential part of collections care. Adhering to a strong set of collections information and cataloguing standards through institutional collections management policies can help preserve the history of your collection for the future, and make your department’s day-to-day activities more efficient—from preparing exhibition lists, to managing conservation tasks. Terms of the [...]
Museums are busy places, and you may have more tasks to complete than hours in the day. It’s easy to feel cut off from other departments in your museum, and silo mentality can hurt both your department and projects. When your tasks require cross-department collaboration, you can find your busy schedule makes it impossible to [...]
Your department is extremely busy. Your team has a wide variety of tasks to complete, and sometimes it seems like many of them aren’t even related to your collection. By the time you’re done with your regular administrative tasks, half the day has gone by and it feels like you haven’t gotten anything done. Exhibition [...]
Collection organizations such as museums and art galleries use a museum collections management system (CMS) to keep track of complex interdepartmental data and information pertaining to the objects in the collection. Since the records of your most valuable collection objects are tracked by a museum CMS, that information must be easily accessed by all members [...]
Upgrading or replacing your Collections Management System (CMS) can feel like an overwhelming project. Securing funding, researching options, and facilitating internal agreement are challenging tasks to add to your already heavy workload. However, once you’ve replaced your CMS, you’ll look back and marvel that you managed for so long working with the inefficient processes and [...]
Promoting Teaching and Research Through Excellence in Collections Management The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is among the oldest museums of its type in the world, and is home to one of the finest collections of human cultural history. Since the late nineteenth century, the Museum has played an active [...]
