Safe in what way? Are you worried about people hacking into the system and taking the content? Nothing is 100% and as long as you make regular backups you should be protected. There are pros and cons with free software, some pros are that sometimes they could be more advanced then purchased software (think of Wordpress) and have great features. Cons is that sometimes they are not well funded and could go under very quickly and you are not stuck without any future updates and will then have to move everything to a new system. Sometimes they may not have the staff to keep up with security or new features.
Whoever you are looking at you want to see what type of operation they are? Do they have several developers on staff or is it just one guy that created the program. Look at the community/blogs/forums and see how recent the comments and responses are, they should be very recent anything more then a month old is not a good sign. Also if you see a lot of spam in the posts this means that nobody is watching the posts and again not a good sign. You should also check to see if people can write plugins for the program, if so how many are out there, if there are only a few plugins this would indicate that not many people are interested in the program.
Free software can be great but you need to be careful.
Also note if they are an "online" service look through the privacy notes and rights. Many of the online services say that if you upload to the server they would have the right to share the content. E.g. Facebook will share the images with anyone and with 3rd party if you allow it, and if you read Facebook's privacy rules they say they currently do not share the content, which to me leaves the door open.
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Raymond Stivala
Manager of Web/Multimedia Development
The Newark Museum
Newark NJ
Original Message:
Sent: 07-05-2016 08:38 AM
From: Daphne Deeds
Subject: Online free collections management programs
Are free online collections management programs safe? If so, which is the easiest to use?
DAPHNE ANDERSON DEEDS
fine art and museum consultant