Hi Everyone,
At the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne our Archives Department’s MS Access database is approaching the end of its working life. Building it started back in 1995/6 and has been upgraded and enhanced continuously since, allowing it to match all the particular needs of the department. It has served us well, but we need to future proof the data it contains. Microsoft no longer supports Access and it can no longer be dependent on the one staff member who created it and who will be retiring soon.
We have to find another package that will offer us security, flexibility and be compatible with Australian forms of archival description.
Our artefact collection is now being recorded Vernon, a collection management application intended principally for museums, as management of that part of the holdings has recently been handed to the Medical History Museum at the University of Melbourne. It has been suggested that we transfer documentation of the archives to that platform as well.
We need advice from anyone who has had experience in choosing a new application for their archives. It must look to the future (as Access no longer does) and be versatile enough to customise or adapt for multiple purposes – accessioning, transferers/donors, provenance, series descriptions, disposal, reference, loans, movement, web publishing etc. Ongoing support is vital.
If you are a corporate archive what are you using and how is it serving your needs? What is out there that we can examine? Is there something available off the shelf or do we resort again to building our own system from another relational database?
Help very gratefully received!
Robyn Waymouth
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