Collections Management Functional Analysis

Owned by Megan Forbes
Last updated: Feb 21, 2011 by Mal Ahern (Unlicensed)Version comment
3 min read

Overview

Our current CMS has limited collections management functionality, focusing primarily on acquisition (and by shoehorning, loans in). Collections management functionality is handled via the "registrar/lots" tab, which includes a search mechanism for acquisitions and loans in, and a donor directory.

Lots

The lots tab includes a basic and advanced search, information about the donation or loan, donor, any related documents, and a list of all objects attached to the donation or loan.

Users may use a basic keyword or advanced search to locate acquisition records.

Use: Frequent

  • Search results are not sortable

Screenshots:
registrar/lots search
registrar/lots advanced search

Basic

Contain core donation or loan information, including the accession or loan number, method, and provenance information.

  • Donor name is not included in the basic tab because of the limitations of using controlled vocabularies
  • The identification number functionality was tweaked at some point to allow for auto-generation of id numbers; in MMI's implementation this functionality has never worked particularly well, and often odd changes are made to id numbers (especially loans in)

Use: Frequent

Screenshots:
registrar/lots basic tab

Donors

Contains a link to the donor name via the entity authority.

  • Very strange relationship locution, "Donor was donated by the lot"
  • Field is not repeatable, which is problematic

Use: Frequent

Screenshots:
registrar/lots donor tab

Documents

Contains documents related to the acquisition/loans in record.

Use: Never

Screenshots:
registrar/lots documents tab

Change log

Contains a history of all actions performed on a record.

Use: Often

Screenshots:
registrar/lots change log tab

Lot objects

Contains a list of all objects related to an acquisition or loan.

  • Lot objects cannot be added via this tab; they must be added via the registrar tab in the edit screen
  • A user may re-number lot objects via this tab; this functionality is not used
  • There is no method of ensuring that all objects are attached to the lot, or that only the correct objects are attached to the lot (e.g. by noting an identification number mis-match)

Use: Often

Screenshots:
registrar/lots lot objects tab

Donor Directory

This tab allows users to search, edit, and create authority records for donors.

Use: Often

Search

Users may use a basic keyword or advanced search to locate donor records.

Use: Frequent

  • Search results are not sortable
Basic

This tab allows users to edit the name of the donor.

Use: Frequent

Contacts

This tab allows users to create or edit records for contact names, telephone numbers, fax numbers, and emails.

Use: Often

  • "Contact info" (which includes Email, Fax, and Telephone) is edited in a separate tab from "Addresses." Each field in each of these tabs is repeatable.
Addresses

This tab allows users to create or edit records for donor addresses.

Use: Often

  • "Contact info" (which includes Email, Fax, and Telephone) is edited in a separate tab from "Addresses." Each field in each of these tabs is repeatable.
  • In many, if not most, of the donor records the address is incorrect. That is, each donor's correct address was entered into the wrong donor's record. It is likely that this was due to a migration error that occurred when the donor records came over from the access database. If the pattern of error is easily to discern it may be possible to correct it when we migrate to CS.
Change log

Contains a history of all actions performed on a record.

Use: Often

Lots

Contains a list of all lots related to a donor.

  • Lots cannot be added via this tab; the relationship between a lot and a donor must be added in the lot record under the "donors" tab.