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 -- Apologies for cross posting --

Dear colleagues

I'd be very grateful for any advice you may be able to offer on choosing or developing electronic catalogues for archived material and business records.  The Arts Council has 'catalogued' some of its archived material, but this has not been done to any recognisable standards and entries have been recorded in an Excel spreadsheet.  Due to forthcoming office moves and restructuring, there is an opportunity now to persuade senior management that we need to have an appropriate catalogue system to store information about this material.  There is concern that this will need to be done very quickly in order to capitalise on our small window of opportunity, and we may end up with a standard library system that is cheap and off the shelf and perhaps not suitable for archival material, or will not allow us to develop the collection in the future, such as through retrospective cataloguing and digitising some of the material and making it freely available through a web based system.  We do not currently have an EDRMS in place, and it doesn't look as though that is likely to happen in the foreseeable future.  It would of course be useful to have a system that can cope with both types of material.

It would be really useful to know:
 

• what systems you use to create catalogue entries about your records/archives?
• are there any particular systems you'd recommend - or avoid?
• has anyone gone through a similar process, and do they have any useful advice?

Many thanks - Jennifer

Jennifer Perkins
Archives Project Manager
Arts Council England
Direct line +44 (0)20 7973 6549
Mobile +44 (0)7786 540685
Fax +44 (0)20 7973 6411
Email [log in to unmask]

www.artscouncil.org.uk