Re: [Fsfe-uk] Museum Collection Management Software

[Simon Waters]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Lee Braiden wrote:
| On Monday 14 March 2005 17:57, Richard Smith wrote:
|
|>If you can't find a free database front-end that meets your needs, and
|>you have 2 grand to spend, I'm sure you could hire someone to write one
|>for you.
|
|
| Agreed.  For the price of a software license, you could pay someone to
get an
| Free Software project started, which would be free forever, and is
likely to
| be appreciated and enhanced by many similar organisations.

I'd be surprised if there wasn't a good starting point out there because
many collections are held by public bodies, and some public bodies make
software available under free software licences, or licences which if
not "free software" embody at least some of the values of the free
software movement (the US federal government being one such body).

John,

Search engines are your friend, but you need to know what to look for....

Look for US gov organisations ".gov" ".edu", and organisations ".org",
as well as UK organisations and education ".org.uk" ".ac.uk".

Also check out bodies like UNESCO and the MDA.ORG.UK to see if they have
any ideas.

Include licence hints to narrow searches, i.e. +GPL



With this bit of free software know-how I hit on "museolog" as the first
candidate for you to check, GNU GPL, UNESCO funded development, Postgres
and Apache TOMCAT (yes it is written in Java, which I think is a feature
but may create some free software issues, depending how well it runs on
free Java implementations - or you might be prepared to use proprietary
Java if purity of licencing isn't your main goal).

Doesn't look terribly active development, but there have been a couple
of point release since 4.5 in 2003 judging by the tar balls, so maybe
someone loves it. Probably helps to speak Russian given their original
target audience but everything I saw was in English, and I think
Museolog maybe a German "pun".


Another one requiring MS Access and very quiet of late...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mcm-f-access/

It may help to know what sort of collection it is - as I couldn't track
down if University of Kansas still support OzLab for natural history
specimens.

Probably the MDA is the place to start, but a lot of the people working
on Museum collection classification at Univerisities seem to have gone
on to release proprietary software.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFCNjkaGFXfHI9FVgYRApGDAKCYSsKmqKJum4iUErReMmFIhDKF3gCgiUWN
Ycds3vh/Ztgnk31MY0ZU+fA=
=8Kr4
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----