Open Source Collections Mangagement System

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Amelia Bowan on April 5, 2009 at 9:19am

I think it is a fantastic idea. When we had our lecture on the various CMS that museums were using today and our lecturer raised the issue of cost, the very first thing I thought of was "Why isn't there an open source project working on this?" I meant to go and look it up online to investigate but haven't had time in the last few weeks.

Permalink Reply by Robin Boast on April 6, 2009 at 6:33am

This is certainly one of the major problems. Not only does the vast majority of commercial CMS systems look, and function, like the were developed in the stone age, but you have to pay 1,000s for the privilege of using these stone age solutions. I remember building far better CMS systems, and far better looking too, out of DB2 back in the mid1980s. That is a very embarrassing situation for museums.
However, I think what is far more important about the open-source CMS is that it can challenge the highly standardized, locked and centralized documentation practices that the existing systems so rigorously enforce. Open-source CMSs are potentially a means of breaking the documentation dictatorship that has come to dominate.

Permalink Reply by Nick Poole on January 3, 2012 at 10:00pm

Hi Robin, 

Hope this finds you well, and enjoying a good Christmas/New Year! I came across this old post of yours and just wanted to clarify something for the record. Very little of the business model of a museum CMS vendor is about software licensing costs. The real cost is the huge amount of support and bespoking that goes into the implementation of each instance of the software. 

While Open Source solutions may or may not be more technically elegant (and many of the better-established outfits have fairly comprehensively updated their codebase in the last couple of years), the fact remains that many museums need more support in the implementation and management of their CMS than an open-source community is able to offer. 

There is also the development path issue - most museums have at some point to commission bespoke development work either to integrate legacy systems or to make the CMS function as part of a web publishing workflow. Although the apparent benefit of open source is that the codebase is available, it is very often the case that the actual development community is either very small or non-existent - meaning that all users are dependent on the same core team.

I think people sometimes make the mistake of thinking that a Collections Management System is about the software. It is much more about the fit with the organisation, the specific functionality, the ease and availability of support and the cost of specific development. I fear that many open-source CMS (Collections Management System) initiatives miss the basic issue of the long-term support implications and focus instead on making software solutions. 

All best, 

Nick

Permalink Reply by Emma Di Pietro on April 4, 2011 at 10:40pm

Open source is a great option for museums, especially small, low budget ones! I found this resource on museum open source from CHIN that I found useful while researching the use of open source within my museum. It gives tips on applying open source software in your museum and also provides links to other resources. Thanks for a great discussion starter!