We recently launched our online collections database program this past summer exclusively to our local academic/institutional community. We have a lot of data and image clean-up to do but felt like it was 80% ready for use by our community. I have no feed-back yet from users but you are welcome to take a look at it. Email me at
tslock@iaia.edu and I will email you the access instructions. Our goal is to have the online colls. available to the public in a couple of years.
The program we are using is Filemaker. We considered using an off-the-shelf program like Past Perfect which looks like an excellent choice for almost any museum so I don't think you can go wrong with them. Our decision to work with filemaker had to do with the ease of being able to work with making programmatic changes ourselves rather than paying a company service to do it for us. We can easily go into the program and make field changes, script changes etc. This program so far has been very useful to us for colls. mgmt. and researching our colls. So far we are very happy with it. Good luck to you.