28 Oct
2010
28 Oct
'10
12:57 p.m.
Al Kossow wrote:
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.
Yes, that seemed logical to me - it just didn't seem to be the way that most
museums operate. Maybe it's down to historical hang-up (after all, I can see
that there are benefits to attaching semantics to ID numbers if you don't have
a nice computer-driven search system on-tap), or maybe there's some sort of
fundamental assumption made that *any* museum is like a library (just not for
books) and so has to have some kind of dewey-a-like cataloguing system.
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.)
Yes, I ended up needing quite a number of fields per asset record - some of
those being pointers to other records in other tables, each with several
fields of their own. I don't think that the implementation is by any means
complicated, but the amount of information that needs to be captured gets
quite large, and there's a lot of effort required in deciding exactly what to
capture.
It's surprising how much of the data ends up being quite freeform in nature
too, with lots of care needed when entering it into the system.
cheers
Jules