Or maybe to have one system that does it all, in terms of (extended) content management. 

Website, collection (both internal information, the 'real; collection management, as well as the web display of collections), exhibition and events. And everything else that a museum or gallery needs. Plus the shop (e-commerce for tickets, donations, merchandise, membership, etc), all integrated into one, single database, and managed using one integrated, web based software. With no compromises in terms of quantity and quality of meta-data you can have, flexibility to adapt to individual and changing needs, access to external resources and vocabularies (e.g. Getty), mapping to ontologies (e.g. CIDOC-CRM, Lido or Dublin Core), integrated rights and digital asset management (local as well as online), production of reports in PDF as well as XML, APIs (that can easily  This would cover most of the needs of any small of large museum, leaving out (thanks to Nick Poole for his excellent analysis):

- School Group Bookings Systems
- Office/productivity systems (including Contacts systems)
- Customer Relationship Management Systems

The problem we have with Drupal and the likes is that… we already have such a system, which has been built from scratch over the last ten years following our work with museums and galleries. In time (next year) will integrate what is outstanding. Should that system be open source? It can be, if we find a compelling reason for it: in any case we do not charge a license fee for it, only implementation (i.e. we do not make money from selling it, at this stage).

And regarding what Tim Trent said:

> I think the most important WCMS element is WYSIWYG.

With similar vigour I would say this is not what's important, quite the opposite. What you get depends on where you get it and when you get it and changes all the time, with new browsers, new technologies, new platforms. Stick to WYSIWYG and your content is out-of-date as soon as you have created it. What you want to see is the web of logical connections between content objects, the network of relationships that define meaning for content according to contextual environments, in an abstract way. This goes back to the point I was trying to make earlier: content is one thing and presentation another. They should talk to each other as little as possible.

Best, Cristiano



> I think the difficulty comes when you want to use a Content management system (like Drupal and WordPress) to exhibit collections.
> Then the webCMS has to have many of the attributes of a musCMS.
> 
> I think the answer, as has been suggested, is a three part system.
> * Collections management
> * Exhibition Data management
> * Presentation system (web or otherwise)
> 
> I think I now understand the original question to relate to the specification of a presentation system for web use that would integrate exhibition data with the other important elements of museum website.
> 
> However, it seems to me that the missing part that needs to be built, is something that can import data from a wide variety of collections management systems and export it for use in a wide variety of off the shelf open source Content Management Systems?
> 
> e.g. Import objects, output articles (with rich metadata)


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Cristiano Bianchi
Keepthinking

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