Selecting a Catalog Management System: A Make-Versus-Buy Case Study

We recently completed a comparison of about two dozen software packages in an attempt to meet our museum’s needs for an asset, collection, and catalog management system. Catalog management systems provide ways to add and organize items, describe them with metadata, and make it easier to sort, search, and manage them as a series of collections. Our comparison included a make-versus-buy decision because we have also been developing a custom software solution internally called the Catalog Maintenance System. Our decision-making process is presented as a case study describing how we assessed various commercially available solutions, our selection criteria, and our tentative decision. Hopefully, our experience will be useful to other museums and similar organizations.

A good catalog management software solution is especially important to a virtual museum, like HCLE . Almost every museum, library, archive, and collection needs some way to keep track…