Is anyone out there letting people OTHER than conservators or registrars use the Conservation Module?  Our conservators are finally seeing some value to using TMS in their planning, and have asked me to develop some pretty complicated Crystal Reports to allow other users to make Conservation Requests for artworks in the collection.  They want the report to have a lot of controlled vocabularies so that users are forced to use the terms that make sense to a conservator in their request, and to give information that the conservators need to carry out the request.  I think this requires some fancy “if/then” formulas whereby IF a request is for exhibition planning, THEN they have to provide the title of the exhibition, etc.

My initial thought was to make a much simpler report that an end user would produce and email to Conservation.  A conservator who received the request would enter the request into TMS to track.

That does require someone entering the data twice—once onto a crystal report, and again into the conservation module.  Our conservators thought that was too much work and wanted the report itself to input the information, which I realize a report can’t do.

I wonder, though, if we could set securities up so that users could make a request by filling the information into the Conservation Module themselves before running a report that would show it in the right place.  Then the report could just serve as a flag to Conservation that there is a request pending.  Although I guess there would be no way of securing it so that a non-conservator could make a “Examination Request” survey type, but no other type…

I think that what our conservators want is something like MFABoston has with their Artemis program where a user can make a  conservation request on the intranet that goes directly into a database—but this surely isn’t directly into TMS, is it?

Any thoughts would be really appreciated..  I failed to find a solution for them nine years ago when they wanted TMS to do something I couldn’t make it do, and it led into a whole bunch of separate databases.  I’d like to try to make them happy with TMS again now that I have another chance…

Thanks,

David

David Aylsworth

Collections Registar

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

tel:  713-639-7824

fax: 713-639-7780