OT Re: Cataloguing in a museum setting

On 10/28/10 8:23 AM, Jules Richardson wrote: CHM uses lot numbers (Xyyyy.nnnn) for artifacts that come together as a single donation, and 9 digit accession numbers for each part that can have a separate storage location. Sub-assemblies of an artifact with a single location are recorded in the descriptive comment field. -- The CHM inventory started as a Filemaker data base. We now are using Mimsy XG http://www.selagodesign.com/portfolio/mimsyxg.php which is designed for museum collection management. If someone were starting today, they would probably just use a relational data base with a single unique identifier and have related fields for the lot and assembly heirarchy. You need at least the donor/lot grouping, and physical location of the artifact. Collections management needs several other groupings as well (on loan, etc.)