Hi y'all!

We're a group of high school students passionate in software engineering.

We want to build a Collections Management System (CMS) for small-medium museums with no dedicated IT departments upon the suggestion of our teachers and a friend whose aunt is in the field.

As part of our work flow, We are here to conduct research and collect User Stories to supplement the research we have done and further optimise the product's design.

Hence, if its not too much trouble. we would love for you to share your experience using existing CMSes. Details we need include but aren't limited to:

1. What type of Museum you run and its focus area.

1.The name of the CMS you are using(optional)

2. How do you use the CMS and what you use it for in your unique situation.

3. What features inside it you can't live without.

4. Challenges you faced using the CMS.

5. Features you wished were inside the CMS but aren't.

6. Anything else you think is really valuable to a good CMS for you or anything info you really wish to add.

Thank you folks for your time. Running a museum is hard, busy work and you even taking a few seconds of your day to read our post means the world to us. 🥰

This sounds like a cool project! I'd love to follow along because I'm working on something similar - building a new museum management system from scratch as a hobby. (I'm blogging it if you want to follow along and compare ideas!)

https://medium.com/@bobpritchett/a-future-for-the-past-f90c46bbd9ea

I started because my local museum uses PastPerfect 5 for their photo archive and the software is very awkward for searching and browsing. They have a huge photo collection but it's very difficult to search, and I'm told it's also awkward to edit and update. And while they're moving to the web version (which will at least mean I don't have to physically visit the photo archive the few hours a week it is open!) the PastPerfect galleries on other museum sites aren't inspiring.

I want fast browsing, find-as-you-type searching, and smart searching that can find things with poor metadata and terminology that varied over many years.

To its credit, PastPerfect seems to have very thorough field support and to be deeply grounded in museum processes and standards. It is used all over. It's just very difficult for museum patrons to explore, and the interface paradigms are a couple decades old. (The days of big screens full of forms and step-by-step query builders are over!)

My advice is to start from the workflow; learn what the museum staff (and patrons!) want to do and how they want to do it, and then design your tool to work they way they work. Software used to be designed around how the computer worked (the forms are literally the database structure rendered on screen), but we don't have to live that way anymore. 

The challenge for software engineers is to use what you know about how the computer works to make the computer work how the user does. That's what's new - and what AI and today's computing power allow. Most software products just haven't gotten there yet.