PastPerfect Online

[StephGaub]

We are going to be purchasing the online software for PastPerfect. I'm looking to find out from other institutions that use this feature how they determined which fields to include in the online profile for your collections. Also, I'd like to hear any issues you've had with the program. I'm excited about getting our collections online to expand our audience and research capabilities, but I'm not sure just what information I should make available. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!!!

[ccross]

I would suggest visiting the Oshkosh Public Museum website, their virtual exhibit is excellent. I am sure either their archivist or their registrar would let you know how they went about deciding what information to put on line.

[StephGaub]

This is a great feature, but we are actually looking at using the online collections application rather than the virtual exhibit. Too bad we can't use both This museum looks really awesome - thanks for making me aware of it!

Here's the link to organizations that are currently using this application http://www.pastperfect-online.com/. We're excited that our collections are going to be accessible online and can't wait to get this functioning!!! No matter what software you use to get your collections online, I'm still interested in knowing how others determined what information to put on the web as it relates to individual artifacts.

[Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singe]

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.

[StephGaub]

What types of problems did you have and about how long did it take you to get your records to the point where you felt they were ready to go online. Also, how many staff members did you have working on the project? We only have about 4 that will be doing most of the work!

[StephGaub]

Tatiana pointed me in the direction of a publication put out by the Getty Foundation that outlines their report on online collections. It is titled "L.A. Art Online: Learning from the Getty's Electronic Cataloguing Initiative" and it is available online at http://www.getty.edu/grants/pdfs/LA_...ine_Report.pdf

Thanks so much!

[StephGaub]

Well, I now have the software and my department is working on getting our collections ready to publish. We're shooting for a June 2009 launch. As I get further into this project, I'll let everyone know any problems I encounter and how we determined what to include in our online records. I'm excited!!!

[Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singe]

I'm anxious to hear how it all works out for you. I'll put a note on my outlook calendar to take a look at your site sometime this summer.
All my best,
Tatiana

[nkemler]

Well, I didn't use Past Perfect but we have just launched our collections online using the open-source option called Collective Access. You can see the front-end result here: GVSU Online Art Collection.

What you don't see there is the administrative interface. The system is very customizable and powerful. However, it does take someone with a technological background (php, css, mysql, etc.) to successfully install and use it.

For museums, and other non-profits, it's now possible to have an online collection and full collection management system for FREE. Collective Access is open-source (free) and web servers such as Dreamhost offer free hosting for non-profits.

[StephGaub]

Well, I finally have the first portion of our collections online. PastPerfect was very easy to use to accomplish this. There are still a couple of little things that I need to add as far as a statement that our library holdings are non-circulating, but other than that it's done until the next additions in December (we're adding collections every 6 months). The people at PastPerfect were very helpful with the couple of questions that I had, and I found the entire process of uploading to be very user friendly. If anyone is considering using PastPerfect online, I'd be happy to speak with them about my experience.

Oh yeah, here's the link to the fruits of my labor : PastPerfect for the Web, 2008 edition