Arts & Antiques Management Solutions

inst'l collections

For over 20 years, Artsystems has collaborated with the managers of the world's leading corporate collections to create and refine the ultimate tool for what they do. More large and small corporate collections use Artsystems software than all other collections management software packages combined. See our selected list of corporate collection customers

The result is that the industry's best practices are built into Pro software — allowing you to do things right from day one, while providing the flexibility for your unique needs.

With Artsystems Pro, virtually every information management task is automated, saving 90% of the time that would have been spent without it.
(top)

Large Collections:

Large and valuable collections of historical works especially benefit from Pro's robust features, especially its unique Catalogue module, which automates the entry and creation of provenance, bibliography, and exhibition history citations referring to individual or multiple works.

All the needed reports are built in, and others can be readily customized and formatted by the user or by our experienced staff.

Corporate collections can be easily placed online with our integrated Web Manager Web sites. Recommended: Pro, Web Manager.
(top)

small collections:

Just because your collection is not worth millions or many thousands of dollars (yet) doesn't mean you don't need to keep track of the who, what, where, when, and how much. If you don't feel the need for the advanced capabilities or the higher cost of Pro, Artsystems Collections is a more modest, earlier-generation alternative, without the Catalogue Module or sales tracking tools. Visit the software section of our site for more differences. Recommended: Collections.
(top)

non fine-art collections:

Artsystems Pro and Collections are both specifically designed to manage decorative art, antiquities, tribal, or other non picture/sculpture type of collections — with user-defined inventory Type, Category, and Material fields as well as dozens of other user-defined fields and unlimited image attachment for flexible record keeping. Recommended: Pro, Collections, Web Manager.
(top)

 


Solutions for Corporate and Small Museum Collections

Need to manage a growing collection? Looking to upgrade your collections management system? Read on for some important points to consider.

what kind of system does a corporate or small museum collection need?

The most important tool a corporate or small museum collection manager can have is a relational-database information management software system. A quality relational-database system saves untold amounts of time by recording, automatically cross-linking, and tracking essential information in one easily accessible place, with no need to enter any information more than once. A quality system generates concise and comprehensive reports and can easily locate and track the movement of works in the collection. With this kind of system, users can quickly and automatically perform tasks that were once complicated and time-consuming, including many that before were not even possible.

WHY A QUALITY SYSTEM?

A good collection not only improves the quality of life at the workplace or within a community, but it is also an important corporate financial asset, and as such, needs to be efficiently tracked as well as physically conserved. A quality collection management solution does this well, as it records, tracks, and utilizes the wide array of important information needed to help manage this valuable asset to its potential, documenting the information necessary to back up and enhance its value.

How accurately this information is recorded, clearly it is organized, and efficiently it works together to automate information management tasks is all critical to success. System performance impacts the efficiency to such a degree that the system utilized should be the best available: well proven, comprehensively supported, and designed specifically for collection management.

WHAT does A QUALITY SYSTEM DO?

A good system integrates contacts, object, transactions and financial information. It automates as many information tasks as possible: recording and tracking works, managing contacts and correspondence, generating labels, lists, and reports, creating documents — pretty much everything imaginable, in the most efficient manner, and in ways particular to the industry's accepted best practices. The 'relational' capacity of the database means that related records (artist-artwork-source) are only a click away, and any mistakes made in repeated names or terms only need to be corrected once to update the entire system. Often-used pre-filtered lists ('sculptures on loan', 'small framed works') can be saved to a drop-down selection. A quality system also successfully integrates other useful software packages such as Microsoft Word or Outlook, Adobe Acrobat — even remote barcode scanning applications to help track the work away from the database.

Does a better system mean a better collection?

A software system is a tool to help build, maintain, and safeguard a collection. Of course, better tools can help get better results. And as the value of few assets rely more heavily on related information than do art and antiques collections — record keeping and analysis is very important to the maintenance and the value of any collection. In considering an information management system, one thing is for sure: the better designed, more powerful, and more integrated a system, the more successfully a collection can be managed.

So what is in a quality system?

  • Robust software technology to make it strong, stable, flexible, and powerful
  • Comprehensive features that are useful and efficient, built by true software developers and refined over many years by the industry's leaders
  • Intelligent, elegant, and sophisticated software design to make it intuitive and efficient
  • Deep company and staff experience in art and antiques management, computers, and software programming
  • A large base of successful users proving the system's quality and ensuring its long-term future viability

Click on the above links to find out how Artsystems leads the way in each and every category, and why the vast majority of leading private and corporate collections — large and small — who use a collection management software system use Artsystems GalleryPro or Artsystems Collections. For more details on which program is right for you, see the column at left and visit the GalleryPro and Collections product pages.

(top)