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:
Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2008
10:28 AM
To: TMSUSERS@SI-L
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
Registrar for Collections
telephone: 713-639-7824
fax: 713-639-7780