Good morning,

Because I wasn't fast enough with exploring the possibility of adapting
the conservation modules of TMS in a manner that was acceptable for our
conservation department, they went ahead and created their own database
that they use for their own purposes.  It's a beautiful database, and is
very useful for them.  They also had very strong feelings of mistrust of
the security abilities of TMS and did not want access to many of their
reports to general users.

Now, though, they are starting to realize some of the benefits of having
at least some of their data accessible through TMS.  They don't want to
talk about mapping a conversion to dump their data into TMS yet, but
they think that they want the ability within TMS to capture a report of
specific fields from their database.  They suggested doing this through
some sort of hyperlink.

I haven't talked with Gallery Systems about this yet, but I will.  I
have a feeling that this is not an unique problem for me, though, so was
curious about if anyone was dealing with multiple databases and trying
to merge them in a way that would enable both to operate dynamically or
independently?  Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
David

David Aylsworth
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Registrar for Collections
telephone:  713-639-7824
fax:  713-639-7780