Argus

Argus.net a great resource for a large, highly active museum collection

Opmerkingen: Our museum converted from Open Edition to Argus.net at the end of 2013. Lucidea has been a responsive resource throughout the experience. For our use, we have been able to take advantage of the backend customization of the program. We have created new templates and adjusted existing ones to better suit the needs of a large institution with an active collection and exhibition plan. For more complex needs, we are able to contract with their R&D team to develop new functionality as well. Overall this is a powerful tool we use daily for managing a large collection.

Pluspunten:

Flexibility, complexity. The ability to handle many different scenarios and types of collections. The customer support is really solid as well.

Minpunten:

There is some functionality that isn't always consistent when building new templates -- the difference between us creating something in house vs something this is hard coded by the designers on the back end, but I am able to submit those to R&D for tweaking and enhancement in future. The support team is easy to communicate with.

CU Art Museum is able to do more than every before!

Opmerkingen: CU Art Museum was one of the first institutions to use Argus.net and we have had such a good experience with them over the years! Their customer service is unbeatable; they are always open to feedback and ways they can improve usability. We especially love the ability to customize the public portal for our front-end users. We have increased our visibility on campus and awareness of our collection significantly in the last couple of years and the public portal has certainly had a positive impact!

A long conversion process but the resulting Collection Management System was worth it.

Opmerkingen: The CMS accessible to all Gallery staff, which means there is a great deal of time saved by Registration staff from pulling and compiling different information for other staff members - they're now able to do this themselves. Additionally, with an OPAC system, the general public is able to access the full Gallery collection online and do preliminary research before contacting staff for additional information.

Pluspunten:

It's accessibility and ease of searching even for non-regular CMS users. The ability to tailor the security and access levels to different groups and individuals and the ability to easily share searches among these groups. Batch updating and basic data entry are made simple, and most sections are intuitive to use.

Minpunten:

New reports can't be pre-tested in Report Writer for layout functionality and spacing. It would be nice to have an option to click on an object image for an even larger view, as sometimes the primary record image is a little too small for research work. A reference/guide for some of the more seldom utilized areas would be helpful for the administrators, although the ARGUS support staff are usually quick to respond to all questions.

Argus for Collection Management

Opmerkingen: The client support is excellent. Without the continued ability to access knowledgeable and responsive support on the new system, we would have struggled to use the system properly.

Pluspunten:

As an art gallery and art collection with many part time staff, we needed a system that was intuitive so that learning the system was manageable. We also needed to be able to work remotely.

Minpunten:

We had problems with data import when setting up the system as some data went in to the wrong fields. This was partly our fault as we didn't fully understand how Argus worked when we set up the system.