On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, Stephen Hedges <shedges@athenscounty.lib.oh.us> wrote:
... the design of a museum module. Although the proprietary systems use the same or similar database this might not be the best choice. It is clearly a case of shoe-horning additional requirements.
I have a fairly basic question -- what do museums do with the information they have in the database. I went to the SPECTRUM website ( http://www.mda.org.uk/spectrum.htm ) and it looks like it's basically guidelines for describing the objects held by a museum.
There is both workflow and information description in the published SPECTRUM manual --- some 500+pages. A copy is beside me on the desk.
... (I have no experience in museum work, so I may be missing something.)
Neither do I per se but I was regularly a living object :-) at the Science Museum --- as an operator of their amateur radio station. However, my wife is a professional curator.
So I'm guessing that for you, Koha would be a way to store and retrieve information about the objects you've collected.
That's the fundamental requirement. But I question whether a MARC oriented schema is appropriate? Commerical projects have seen me writing data conversion programs reading from MARC tapes to input into text retrieval systems. A comparison of MARC fields/sub-fields with SPECTRUM requirements is probably needed. There is a lot of provenance information associated with objects; I don't remember MARC having any field for that. Also considerable descriptive inforamtion.
... Or do you sometimes loan items as well, and need to track them much as a library tracks book loans?
Yes. Not unknown for items to be loaned to several places in sequence, e.g. Holland, Germany, Japan, and onto USA before being returned home. Thinking creatively I suspect that serials management is a better paradigm than book loans. Regards, Trevor British Sign Language is not inarticulate handwaving; it's a living language. Support the campaign for formal recognition by the British government now! Details at http://www.fdp.org.uk/ -- <>< Re: deemed!