Some organizations manage collections with spreadsheets, documents, rudimentary in-house software, library automation systems, or open-source software that requires costly customization and maintenance. These tools tend to offer limited support and often fall short of professional standards. The best collections management systems (CMSs) deliver powerful functionality out-of-the-box while being configurable for a collections’ unique needs without time-consuming consulting, programming, and training.

“CMS” can also refer to a content management system which can be used as a web or digital content publishing platform. Both collections management systems and content management systems can have some overlapping features and underlying software technologies. In the context of this article, CMS refers to a collections-oriented system with specialized capabilities used to manage cultural heritage collections from acquisition to outreach. A collections management system is not dissimilar to digital asset management (DAM) or media asset management (MAM) systems, which are built to organize media files but lack repository capabilities. While this article focuses on collections management systems, many of the suggestions conveyed can help professionals evaluate and migrate to DAM, MAM, and other content systems.

A CMS improves workflows and expands online accessibility, as well as offering other benefits:

More productive use of resources, labor, and time
Elimination of redundant data entry and effort
Faster, more accurate reporting
Swifter onboarding of staff members
Improved preservation and security
Enriched searching across collections
Increased research and educational opportunities
Greater visibility and use
Better standards application
More granular and material-responsive arrangement levels
More user-responsive and increased description levels
More potential for growth, partnerships, and outreach

The ability to maintain complete physical and intellectual control of collections is a significant advantage. Nancy Richey, a librarian for the Kentucky Research Collections at Western Kentucky University, states: “We knew that we needed a CMS not only because our collections were underused, but also because they were more vulnerable to theft. You cannot protect, process, or promote what you do not know you have.”[1]

While most information professionals understand a collections management system’s importance, selecting and implementing a CMS or any other information management system is less widely understood. Yeh and Walter categorized critical success factors in integrated library systems implementation case studies as strategic and tactical:

From the strategic perspective, top management involvement, vendor support, staff user involvement, interdepartmental communication, and staff user emotion management are critical. From the tactical perspective, project team competence, project management and project tracking, data analysis and conversion, and staff user education and training to break down the technical barrier greatly affect implementation outcome. In addition, selection of the final system from a variety of choices and options requires a careful consideration of both strategic and tactical issues.[2]

Similarly, the successful implementation of a CMS depends on a balance of strategic and tactical issues within the organization. A CMS offers a variety of features to meet institutional needs, but no one-size-fits-all solution exists. Each system differs in usability, functionality, and purpose. Just as collections are unique, so are the needs of an organization seeking a CMS.

Inception

The discovery process to document system needs begins with choosing selection committee members, such as budget decision-makers, subject matter experts, and potential power users. Involving the right people allows organizations to increase adoption, consider different perspectives, and ensure desired results.

IT involvement is critical to a successful implementation and the department understands the organization’s network and the potential system’s technical requirements. Their expertise helps select a solution that integrates with infrastructure, applications, and workflows. When evaluating a CMS, information professionals consider how their options will interact with other institutional systems. To optimize performance with the chosen system, bring the hardware and software vendors together for systems integration meetings.

Ensure that the organization employs enough experienced staff for the project. If not, hire experts to fill functionality gaps. Involving colleagues across the organization underscores the initiative’s importance, solidifying commitment to the new system. Assigning the project to a single staff member or a department is ineffective. For a project rooted in change management, such as a CMS implementation, the culture shift cannot rest with a sole champion. Institution-wide embrace of the solution ensures success.

Once the team assembles, designate the project manager, and find a project sponsor who provides resources, support, and influence. Set up meetings to address questions and meet milestones. The team should interview key stakeholders for information about requirements and system expectations. Discover what other projects are scheduled near the potential go-live date and determine if any other system changes are in discussion or pending. Ask what systems and software are pivotal to essential job functions and discuss the systems’ interoperability.

The inception process offers opportunities to inspect processes, policies, procedures, and structures. The team should ask:

What is the collection size and scope?
Who enters what information, where, and how?
Who has access to information, where, and how?
How complicated are the workflows?
Where are the process redundancies?
How do users access the collections?
How is information shared between departments?

Organizations should address the management and technology challenges of leveraging a new system integration to redesign their operations. They should determine CMS requirements by prioritizing the findings from these questions:

How will the CMS help achieve the institution’s goals?
What problems will the CMS solve?
What should be solved first? What can be addressed later?
How can the CMS enhance research?
What search and discovery features does the team desire?
How will the CMS reach new audiences?
What are the desired features?
How sustainable is it? Will the CMS support growth?
How much IT support is needed?
Is the data storage adequate?
Where or how would the CMS be hosted?
How will the CMS integrate with existing IT systems?
What is the best option: open-source or commercial?
What is the budget? What are the up-front and hidden costs?
What are the measures of success?

Create a weighted feature checklist, noting necessary and desired features. Mandatory features must be included in the systems considered.

Once the organization determines its requirements, it may issue a Request for Proposal (RFP) that contains information about the organization, its requirements, and the review process. Vendors who meet the conditions will respond. The right vendor delivers and supports powerful collections management systems and understands the institution’s needs.

At the end of the discovery period, the institution will better understand its system requirements. If issues surface related to how the organization manages information, the project will identify and improve them.

Selection

Once the team decides on requirements, they should research offerings to choose the best one for their needs, and assess their skills and resources to determine whether to install a proprietary or open-source system. Although an open-source solution can suit institutional needs, it may be cost-effective to buy a proprietary one. Open source is not free; consider administrative, programming, maintenance, and training costs for open-source systems. Open-source technologies may be backed by support arrangements, which can make them costly.

Some organizations custom-build systems, but the costs exceed a proprietary product’s price. The organization is the first to use the program, discover problems, and fix them. Depending on the collection type, size, and documentation level, a commercial product may be the best option.

As institutions implement off-the-shelf products, vendors improve the software based on client needs, so the system brings other institutions’ accumulated experience. Proprietary systems offer support, training, and customization. With user communities, systems evolve with customer demands, ensuring functionality.

The total cost of ownership measures more than licenses and support; it considers the cost over a longer period when variations can shift value perceptions. The budget includes the purchase and installation of software and hardware, annual fees, licenses, data transfer, training, support, upgrades, and maintenance. Budget hours to attend project meetings, test systems, and clean up data.

Organizations may ask for a rough estimate of costs early in vendor discussions. As the vendor selection narrows, a better idea of costs emerges, with a closing quote based on a three- to five-year contract.

Team members should browse sites with the software installed to view it outside the ideal demonstration environment. They may also wish to visit organizations using the systems on their vendor shortlist, watch webinars, experiment in sandbox environments, and utilize listservs and user groups for information. They should talk to vendors and explore features through demonstrations.

A CMS should support descriptive metadata authoring and encoding, streamlining making collections discoverable online. Choose a software package compliant with a metadata schema appropriate for the collections. The CMS follows standards, such as DACS, EAD, MARC, ISAD(G), or Dublin Core, to make repurposing or exporting data easier. Selecting the appropriate metadata standard and a package that can use controlled vocabularies narrows the selection.

A CMS should also provide flexible support within the full hierarchical model of collections, series, containers, and items. Organizations need to determine the descriptive level appropriate for whole collections or individual items. In a study of digital archival practices, Zhang and Mauney examine how practitioners struggle to build connections between context and content: “The traditional minimal metadata approach that relies on archival context to retrieve archival items may lead to limited digital accessibility, but it is equally unacceptable when granular access to digital content may have to be achieved at the expense of archival context.”[3] Catalogers can use as much of the hierarchy as necessary to balance layered description against item-level description, striving to increase access without overwhelming users. In analyzing collection documentation, Jones states:

The detail found in museum-style item-level description is no doubt useful, but the repetition required to do so without linked description at different levels of the collection puts an unnecessary strain on resources and creates significant maintenance issues for collections management systems and their administrators. Meanwhile, online users can quickly become lost among thousands, even millions, of online records with few pathways available to higher level descriptions which provide an overview of sets of content.[4]

A CMS should link collections to related materials to make these connections evident. As systems evolve, these relationships provide the knowledge necessary to understand collections and their context more deeply. Jones continues:

Collection documentation also needs to be viewed as a knowledge management process. Where things are identified as related to other things, they should be explicitly related rather than relying on the implicit knowledge of staff to navigate through collections. Instead, we have a wealth of connections between and within collections already documented in print catalogues, or in journal articles, book chapters, exhibition text, presentations and gallery tours, while many current systems are still not able to capture this inherently relational knowledge in useful, preservable and retrievable forms. At best, the result is that users relying on collection documentation will need to repeat prior work; at worst, there is a risk of significant organizational knowledge loss.[5]

A CMS, therefore, not only documents information about items, collections, and the organization but also should focus on the management and sharing of knowledge captured in the system.

Arrange for software demonstrations using a sample of institutional data. Evaluating systems with real data gives a higher chance of uncovering issues. Outline real-world scenarios and ask the representative to demonstrate how their product accommodates the situations. Report the issues encountered; if a modification resolves the problem, the system may still prove a good fit. Encourage follow-up questions after colleagues reflect on the demonstrations.

Once the system is selected, examine the vendor contract, and ask the organization’s legal counsel to review it. Request changes until the organization is satisfied.

Migration

When transitioning to a CMS, clean up the data to minimize problems. If multiple people clean the data, ensure they apply the same standards, and use a task management system to track collaboration. Team members can search data fields or a keyword or phrase and then replace it with a case sensitive change, correct spelling, or a different word. If the organization lacks the expertise to clean data, see if the vendor offers such services. Delete outdated records because fewer records result in an easier, less expensive migration. In discussing cleaning collection data before migration, Buchholz advises:

Finding a good balance between fixing old errors and getting the project done can be challenging. The first collections that I tackled had been processed in such a way that, to migrate them, I essentially ended up reprocessing them. That quickly sucked up available time, and I learned to only fix what would be difficult and very time-consuming to fix post-migration.[6]

Before cleaning up data, organizations should decide on the mandatory work necessary to ensure a smooth data migration rather than to devote resources to discretionary clean-up projects.

Clean-up work typically rectifies past institutional practices rather than conforming to CMS features. Responding to a survey of 103 institutions implementing an archival collections management system, a participant noted that issues that arose stemmed from local descriptive practices, not the system itself:

We as a profession are constantly having to develop workarounds for complications due to poor encoding and/or descriptive legacies…Most of the difficulty that institutions are likely to have in implementation are because staff will have to reckon with certain historical or idiosyncratic practices.[7]

If the organization imports legacy data, fields are unlikely to correspond to those in the new CMS. Data mapping matches old fields to new ones in the software, so the post-migration fields are uniform and display data correctly. Work with the vendor to map data and review audit trails of the importing procedures and sample records within the new software to ensure data quality.

Controlled data creates reliable query results. A data standards policy provides guidelines for the records structure and identifies mandatory fields, formats, and contents. It also enables information sharing and ensures against data loss.

Three elements of data standards enable consistent ways to find related items. Data structure standards determine the information the organization wants to be recorded; they identify required or optional fields. Data content standards describe the field’s content, such as what catalogers enter as information. Create guidelines for data entry, such as style, grammar, and abbreviations. Data value standards define the terminology and authority lists used for fields that guarantee consistency.

Policies establish guidelines for documentation and ensure access to collection information. They may include a maintenance and authority policy, which identifies staff permitted to add, modify, or delete records, clarifies procedures for editing information, and notes procedures for maintaining database backups. An access authority policy denotes who has access to information.

Before migrating, understand the team’s skills, especially for a migration with minimal vendor support. Ensure that stakeholders understand who handles migration phases. Many systems have import applications, enabling data transfer from programs and files. Information professionals should convert the data into forms the CMS accepts, such as Comma-Separated Value (CSV) or Extensible Markup Language (XML) files.

Implementation

A realistic implementation schedule ensures devotion to the project and sensible expectations without affecting day-to-day productivity. In discussing a project to migrate 5,000 finding aids into a new CMS, Calahan and Dietrick note:

Dividing the implementation into distinct categories helped the Department in many ways—it allowed staff to take reasonable, focused chunks of work on a large and daunting project; it allowed the Implementation Team to provide clear work expectations over a targeted timeline; and it allowed for focused staff trainings during the time period, where staff would be working on those tasks.[8]

If many departments work together, implementation in waves makes the process easier. A pilot project focuses on a set of employees, then waves increase in time. Once the installation completes, verify that the system works without issues.

Although the project involves many colleagues, having a full-time person responsible for the software maintains its integrity. An administrator troubleshoots the system and assigns user access levels. For example, archivists may be assigned to an access group capable of correcting information in designated fields but unable to change information within a conservator’s purview. Likewise, the administrator could prohibit interns from viewing personal donor information.

Roles and permissions support allows different users to see or edit only information relevant to them. Organizations wish to use a system that all departments can access, even if the data was gathered for different purposes. Data that is centrally located and accessed mitigates the creation of information silos within the organization, limiting duplicated, lost, or outdated data. Being able to access current data throughout the organization allows for better information governance and more efficient workflows.

Commit to training. By establishing an ongoing training program, the organization increases user acceptance and skill development across departments. Consider the different expertise levels of colleagues, and class users by roles to target their training, with the implementation team and administrative trained at the highest level. Some institutions may require the vendor to train colleagues who will teach others. Schedule follow-up sessions to address questions that arise after initial system use.

Once the institution implements a CMS, redefine workflows and adapt them as circumstances change. Often, before an organization used a CMS, many applications were required to complete one workflow. For example, some tasks spanned different systems or relied heavily on email or spreadsheets. A fragmented workflow wastes time and leads to lost or duplicated data. Systems should allow practitioners to complete most, if not all, of the business process steps within the software. Continue to run the legacy system post-migration for a few months so colleagues can access information unable to migrate. Running systems simultaneously ensures that the organization resolves problems in the new system before decommissioning the old system.

Review the data once transferred. Audit the system to ensure that colleagues enter new data into the system properly, and check data during testing and during and after migration. Catching problems early results in fewer problems to fix later.

Collections management systems present data as reports and leverage third-party programs for more complicated reporting. Other systems report into Excel, Word, PDF, or a proprietary format. A CMS can export data for backup, data transfer, system migration, or collaborative purposes. Experiment with available reports and see what may be needed in the future.

Maximizing Value

Cultural heritage institutions recognize that contextual information about their collections is as important as the objects themselves. Organizations communicate such information through exhibitions, publications, lectures, tours, and programs. The Internet allows institutions to present their collections to larger, dispersed audiences. A system’s web presentation empowers users to pursue the stories that most interest them.

The CMS should support publishing curatorial, educational, and marketing content from the collection to a diverse range of formats, platforms, and media channels. Publishing formats include mobile apps, blogs, websites, RSS feeds, and large-scale collaborative repositories like Digital Public Library of America and HathiTrust. By doing so, information professionals aim to provide rich authoring and publishing and boost the complexity of the data relationships established within and between institutions.

Before the advent of collections management systems, most research work required traveling on site or depending on an organization’s staff to do the work. With a CMS, an organization makes its collections accessible to researchers worldwide, opening materials to the community and extending its reach significantly. Freeing collections from traditional structures allows for new interactions between users and repositories and the possibilities inherent in granting greater autonomy to users.

Systems offer analytical tools to determine what collections interest users. Discoveries may lead the organizations to re-evaluate their priorities. For example, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, used an archival CMS to track reference statistics and requests:

With the data captured in the CMS, they can understand the quantity of requests, their difficulty, the length of time it takes to fulfill them, and which collections are being used (or not used). Assumptions about what engages people aren’t always accurate, but with ArchivEra they have an “ongoing digital record” that gives a real sense of what collections people care about. That can inform both collecting policy and exhibition strategy.[9]

Collections benefit from both usage metrics and the user-responsive description levels that a CMS offers. Popular collections might be inventoried more granularly. Conversely, overlooked collections may be finally given the attention they deserve. For example, an Arizona State Library archivist notes how a CMS has allowed her team to uncover holdings:

We can present researchers with real time results of what is in our collections, because with SKCA we have made huge progress towards eliminating our backlog. In fact, Archives staff are now able to look at collections we never had time to focus on; I call this “the rediscovery process,” where we find out long forgotten things about our own materials. With public access enabled by SKCA, our collections are much more visible—they are no longer hidden behind a curtain.[10]

By processing backlogs, more materials become available to users, spurring more requests and research projects. If users access collections frequently, archivists could create richer descriptions and publish updated inventories.

Information professionals should offer interpretation or curatorial description and arrangement to their collections. They could create “highlights tours, defined by audiences or themes. Images can be shown individually, in slideshows, lightboxes, or thumbnails, with captions varying from selections of data fields or longer narratives. Mobile apps can convert CMS data into immersive user experiences and virtual tours.

Investigate the best technology for collection needs. One organization may develop walking tours that access local collections, whereas another institution may offer downloadable maps. To ensure adoption of the technology, encourage feedback from users, integrating their suggestions. Colleagues can build some projects, whereas others require external assistance. Partnerships with other institutions share development time and costs and make collections more discoverable to new audiences.

Conclusion

In an evolving technological environment, information professionals face challenges in locating representation tools to provide accessible content while maintaining context. The twenty-first century offers challenges and opportunities for access, including the suspension of geographical and temporal boundaries through the digital representation of collections, and renewed collaboration efforts between organizations and users.

Collections management systems are robust tools for inventory, accessibility, and contextualization. Because of the enhanced discoverability offered by a CMS, institutions see significant increases in the use of their holdings online and in-person.

A collections management system requires work to ensure the project is successful. Organizations will be surprised at its capabilities and the opportunities to maximize their investment. Implementing a CMS positions information professionals to add value to collections and enhance the organization’s scholarship, pedagogy, and recreational learning competencies.

The digital age offers new opportunities for collections, evidenced by enhanced discoverability, outreach, and services. A properly deployed collections management system improves accessibility, resulting in higher productivity, lower operational costs, and the increased satisfaction of internal and external users, building a compelling future for collections everywhere.

[1] Nancy Richey, “WKU Libraries: Using PastPerfect to Open Hidden Collections,” Infotoday.com, (July/
August 2014): 12.

[2] Shea-Tinn Yeh and Zhiping Walter, “Critical Success Factors for Integrated Library System Implementation in Academic Libraries: A Qualitative Study,” Information Technology and Libraries 35 (2016): 38. DOI:10.6017/ital.v35i2.9255.

[3] Jane Zhang and Dayne Mauney, “When Archival Description Meets Digital Object Metadata: A Typological Study of Digital Archival Representation,” The American Archivist 76, no. 1 (2013): 191.

[4] Michael Jones, “From Catalogues to Contextual Networks: Reconfiguring Collection Documentation in Museums,” Archives and Records, 39, no.1 (2018): 11-12. DOI: 10.1080/23257962.2017.1407750.

[5] Michael Jones, “From Catalogues to Contextual Networks: Reconfiguring Collection Documentation in Museums,” Archives and Records, 39, no.1 (2018): 12. DOI: 10.1080/23257962.2017.1407750.

[6] Laura Buchholz, “Out With the Old, in With the … ArchivesSpace,” OLA Quarterly 25, no. 1 (2019): 33. DOI: 10.7710/1093-7374.1973.

[7] Rebecca Toov and Amanda Wick, “Making it Work – Understanding and Expanding the Utility of ArchivesSpace,” Journal of Archival Organization 14 (2017): 38, DOI:10.1080/15332748.2018.1503019.

[8] Lisa Calahan and Kate Dietrick, “Setting the Stage and Keeping Sane: Implementing ArchivesSpace at the University of Minnesota,” Journal of Archival Organization 13 (2016): 122. DOI: 10.1080/15332748.2018.1443502.

[9] “Moving Beyond the Archival Collections Management Status Quo: An Archivera Success Story,” Lucidea, Accessed January 26, 2021, https://lucidea.com/success/archivera-and-the-museum-of-fine-arts-houston/.

[10] “Arizona State Library, Archives & Public Records and CuadraSTAR SKCA,” Lucidea, accessed January 26, 2021, https://lucidea.com/success/arizona-state-archives/.