David,

 

It sounds like you are on the right track with the suggestion to use an
exhibition.  To a certain extent you need to be flexible and allow the
staff to use TMS in a manner that makes sense to them.  At the same time
you need to balance that with your own professional experience and
provide them with guidance that keeps the system intact.  Working with
creative people is often a challenge.  I have faced similar issues here
in my institution.  For the most part the curators do not even use the
system and delegate all of the responsibility for making checklists and
other TMS related activities to their assistants.

It might be helpful to develop an understanding of what data the staff
is capturing and reporting on in their databases and spreadsheets.  Once
you understand that, you can identify how TMS can achieve the same
thing.  One of the issues that I ran into here was the "complexity" of
the data entry process.  TMS has a form designer that is fairly simple
to use and with it you can create custom data entry screens that arrange
the commonly used fields in a way that makes it easier on the users.

One suggestion I will make is that you take ownership of the exhibition
record creating process.  I'm not sure what the dynamics are in your
organization, but I have found that by creating the exhibition records
myself, I develop a good understanding of what is going on at the
museum.  By becoming a part of the exhibition process, I am able to
engage in dialogue with the staff about what they are doing.  From those
dialogues I am able to get out ahead of their needs and figure out how
to leverage TMS to fulfill them.

Your idea of using a venue constituent as the mechanism for including
and excluding objects is a great one.  You should definitely have a
constituent record for your institution in TMS.  You can also create
constituent records for your curators.  If your curators are like mine,
they like to see their names associated with things, like exhibitions,
publications, press releases and the like.  Make sure that your reports
show the curator's name prominently in the report header.

People will come around and warm up to TMS on their own.  When I started
here the staff really disliked the system and were constantly
complaining about how "Access did this and TMS doesn't."  It turns out
that TMS actually does this and that but I needed to show the staff how.
Just last week the curator who I thought would never touch the system
just asked me how to use it and I spent thirty minutes going over it
with her.  She is excited about it now that she has actually taken the
time to see how it works.

 

________________________________

From: The Museum System (TMS) Users [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Aylsworth, David
Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2008 10:28 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Mis-using Exhibition or loans module

 

I'm making a little headway with getting our curators to use TMS for
their projects rather than making up their own databases and
spreadsheets.  A couple have asked me if they can use TMS as a planning
tool for a deaccession project.  They want something more than just an
object package that they can put object records into as a way of
grouping and considering things that they might want to recommend for
deaccessioning.  

 

Naturally, I want to encourage them to use TMS more and more, so I was
thinking maybe of encouraging them to make an exhibition record, maybe
using the venue features to include or exclude things from active
consideration without actually removing it from the table too far.

 

What do you all think?  Is there a better suggestion?  It seems like
this could get muddy, but it's about the best I could imagine.

 

Thanks for any suggestions and advice!

 

David

 

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