Solutions for Private 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 collector need?

The most important tool an art or antiques collection 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, 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 is able to easily share information with other applications, a Web site, and, if desired, vendors, colleagues, or partners. 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?

Your collection is a considerable investment of love, time, and money. You take it seriously. A quality collection management solution does too, as it records, track, 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. And as your collection outgrows the walls of your home, a quality system also provides creative and flexible tools for you to continue to enjoy your whole collection at all times, through easy-to-produce home-made catalogues or integrated personal Web sites that can be published in minutes.

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 complete fine art and/or antiques 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 ('sculpture 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 a private Web site so that the collector or colleagues may enjoy the entire collection all at once, at any time, and from anywhere.

Does a better system mean a better collection?

A software system is a tool to help you build and safeguard your collection. Of course no mater what you do, better tools help get better results. While obviously a collection will be enjoyable foremost directly as objects, its efficient organization and management — whether by you or a dedicated collection manager — will not only save time for the seeking of your objects of desire, it will likely enhance your enjoyment of the process. 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 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 collections — large and small — who use a collection management software system use Artsystems GalleryPro or Artsystems. For more details on which program is right for you, see the column at left and visit the GalleryPro and Collections product pages.

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