Session 17: ELECTRONIC APPLICATION FOR COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT AND USE
Moderator: Diane Vogt O'Connor, Archivist, Museum Management Program, National Park Service

Information Management: What You Want; What You Need; What You Get
Joan Bacharach, Museum Registrar, Museum Management Program, NPS

This session provided the participants with a strategy and basic tools to evaluate museum information systems.

This six phase strategy identifies what you want, need and get.

1. What is the purpose of the museum? Stephen Weil identifies five goals of a museum they are to:
   • collect
   • preserve
   • educate
   • interpret
   • research
2. What information do you need to identify the museum's mission?
   • Identify the users and all the players
3. What do you have in place?
   • Analyze the system in place. Does it meet your needs. Determine what else is needed? List the good and bad points of this system.
4. What systems are available?
   • Find out what you have to have to do your job. Describe what you want for data entry and reports. List any special features such as indexing and key word searches. List what you would like to have. How fast is the system?
5. What data will you need?
   • Identify core data, mandatory fields, new data, and remember to Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS)! Do a cost benefit analysis on data that needs to be automated. Make sure its dynamic cumulative, and simple to track. Is the data compatible with your previous information management system?
6. Look at the whole process.
   • Clearly define the purpose of your project
   • Develop a plan and schedule.
   • Develop long and short term goals.
   • Consult with your users and describe the features you want.
   • Do a system analysis
   • Decide on either an in-house or commercial system.
   • Weigh the advantages and costs.
   • Complete a functional requirements document
   • Prioritize your requirements

The audience divided into groups to brainstorm ideas for a hypothetical museum interested in obtaining a new information management system.

Social Science and Material Culture: Collections Management in the Information Age
Lori A. Stanley, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and NAGPRA Project Director, Judson Joel White Archeological Technician and Archeological Project Supervisor, and Heather M. Schacht and Emily G. Barr, Student Assistants, Ethnographic Inventory Project, Luther College, Iowa

A case study of the Luther College Inventory and Database Project

Two motivations for the project:

1. Obligations to comply with NAGPRA
2. Responsibility to better manage and use the collection
   • providing proper storage and maintenance
   • enhancing the collection as educating examples

Problems with the process:

1. Two separate collections
2. Collections were small with no staffing or funding
3. No cataloging system
4. No documentation
5. No written history for the Luther College collections

Needed funding, staffing, and information; got funding from smaller foundations outside the college and funding from the college using the need to comply with NAGPRA as the justification.

Progress:
Two students have organized, cleaned, inventoried, researched, and cataloged the collection. Now entering the information into a database. The records can be linked with records of the state archeologist office.