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European Standards Survey

Procedural Standards, Rules and Guidelines 2.1 - United Kingdom

2.1 Collections Management
We are interested in which published Collections Management standards are in use in your country and also any unpublished in-house or evolving standards. These may take the form of procedures, rules or guidelines.

i. Overall Comments:
None

ii. Collections Management Software in Use:
Based on figures from a 1998 mda survey (10% of institutions):
  • MODES Plus (with Catalist) - 45% of the systems & 29% of object records;
  • Access - 6% systems & 1% records;
  • Cardbox - 3% sytems & 2% records;
  • Filemaker Pro - 4% systems & 1% records;
  • Multi Mimsy - 2% systems & 12% records
MODES Plus is especially used by small and medium sized institutions in the local authority and independent sectors.

In larger databases (those over 100,000 records) Multi Mismsy is strong (a result of the LASSI procurement exercise).

Also some larger National museums have in the past developed their own in-house systems.

Other systems in use in UK include:
  • ADMUSE;
  • ARGUS
  • Artifact;
  • CALM2000;
  • Collection;
  • Datapoint;
  • Epoch;
  • House of Images;
  • INCA;
  • InVisage;
  • IMC Modules;
  • Micromusée;
  • MIS;
  • MUSIMS;
  • PastPerfect;
  • The Museum System;
  • Re:discovery
  • Snap! for Windows;
  • Status/M
(Full details of all packages mentioned here can be found on the mda Web site in our Software Survey secion.)

Standard Details
Standard Name:
SPECTRUM: The UK Museum Documentation Standard
Standard Type:
De jure
Number of Museums:
2,500
Number of Objects Covered:
275,000,000
Usage by Significant Collections (Institution name(s)):
SPECTRUM is the only standard in use in the UK. The figures for museums are those for museums as a whole in the UK. The figures for objects are based on the proportion of the whole (c79%) that are documented to MGC registration standards, which are based on SPECTRUM.

Submission Details
i. Submitted by: Gordon McKenna
ii. Job title: Special Projects & Systems Manager
iii. Organisation: mda
iv. E-mail: gordon@mda.org.uk
v. Date Submitted: 14/03/2000

Funded by the European Commission - DGX - Raphaël Programme