Blog

Over the summer the Salmon Arm Museum’s Access database–all electronic records of artefacts and archival material–was converted to Past Perfect, a recognized software designed for small museums. The conversion wasn’t smooth. We hit a few potholes along the “road” mapped by the Past Perfect conversion expert, Jessica. She had her challenges.

SAMHA’s database was 20+ years old and too organic. It was designed by contractor Cliff Quinn, who was connected to the B.C. Museum’s Association a long time ago. We added fields as our needs grew. When we figured out that the photos needed more fields like subjects and people to increase access, more columns were added. When those fields filled to the char limit – the 256 characters imposed by Access–yours truly just added more fields. Easy peasy. We had to preserve the names of all the students in those class photos! Someone might want them someday . . .

The database grew in length and acquired a not-so-fashionable elastic waistband. Eventually, it exceeded the 55,000 count.

Each key term column had to be searched separately, which was very inconvenient. More complicated searches had to be written . . . but I digress.

After the initial conversion, mapping between the databases also needed to be checked. Why were 7,030 records in the Beemish collection assigned to the archives? Archival records are generally one-of-a-kind. Sure, the Beemish records were unique – a collection amassed by Sam Beemish for his radio show–but there weren’t unique records like interviews to be transcribed. Jessica agreed to address this issue.

The big problems, like the Beemish collection, were Jessica’s job, but that left the relatively small corrections, like the 18 glass plate negatives that we placed in objects and not in the photo catalogue, were the responsibility of the archives department.

What’s next? The new database has been installed and up to four people can use it at one time. That’s a huge improvement over Access. We have a year’s worth of cleaning up to do, standardizing location fields, making sure all the artefacts are in the right catalogue, and making things uniform. My exceptional volunteers, Nancy, Barb & Lise are up to the challenge. They need to do the tutorials and the staff at Past Perfect have told me there will be a steep learning curve for all of us, but I have faith.

I can hardly wait to work on uploading large images to the media catalogue that went AWOL for some reason. Luckily, they were never missing, just residing in their unmapped folder, or two, or three.

When I commented on this particular problem to one of the members of Past Perfect’s support team, she replied, “It’s job security.” Hmph. That's just what a grandma wants to hear. It is a job that needs doing, though.

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And a note from the peanut gallery:

"Wish us all the best on this venture," Nancy Tait, Volunteer

And now a word of thanks to our sponsors:

Diane Ambil, donor extraordinaire, was pleased to be able to donate to this project. Diane is a retired teacher librarian who takes collections management seriously. THANK YOU Diane!

Canadian Heritage/Patrimoine Canada

Assisted with the PastPerfect 5.0 Migration through the Museums Assistance Program, Collections Management component. We couldn't have done the job without this support. MERCI!