On 6/30/06 10:01 AM, "" <> wrote: > Hi Matt, > > I'm curious about where the drive is coming from to have a "one stop > solution" mean there's one system under it all. I often feel sorry > for the folks at Past Perfect when I see comments elsewhere about why > doesn't it also do accounting, POS, and your taxes on top of already > managing museum collections, archives, libraries, and membership. I > think it juliennes potatoes too.
I didn't mean to argue that CIS's /should/ offer DAMS-type services. I just think it's a common hope. I was surprised to realize this when it came to DAMS, but museums are the DAMS vendors' most demanding customers. For example, the number of them that can satisfy Deborah's hierarchy demands even partially (or with difficult workarounds) is pretty few. You would think that big real estate companies (region, city, neighborhood, street, house, room--just guessing but you get the idea), for example, might have similar needs. But I guess they're not using DAMS yet, or they're not being very demanding. So given the unlikelihood that a top-notch CIS vendor, really specialized in that field, could also become a first-rate DAMS vendor, I think the one-stop solution is not going to happen. > > Colleges and universities are working to build institutional > repositories (IR) to capture "grey literature' on campuses, and some > of these solutions may be adaptable to building digital repositories > of non-collection materials in a museum, as you suggest - CAD > drawings, exhibit scripts, PR copy, etc. I have seen some custom software vendors looking at Fedora (http://fedora.us) as a back-end for a combined (physical and digital) asset management solution. It certainly meets all the storage & organization requirements, and with an easier-to-use UI layer it could work. > > The challenge of course, is that sometimes these materials are > related to objects in a CIS, or images in DAM. As I suggested to > Dianne, the question may be, how do we build more open systems that > allow interaction between different functions. That is definitely the right approach! Thanks, Matt
