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.

 

 

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