Like most museums, we have an exhibitions department that often needs to borrow objects from our different collections for their purposes. There’s interest in using Specify for managing these different objects from our entire museum, especially where they’re stored. The easy part is creating loans for each object within each collection to register that’s in the possession of the Exhibitions department. However, it would be nice for the Exhibitions department to have their own overview of the different objects they’re handling at any given moment. We were considering creating a separate collection in Specify for the Exhibitions department, but the problem here is that the objects in other collections (or rather: disciplines) will then be invisible to them.
Does anyone have similar experiences and requirements and/or knows of a workaround or permanent solution to this issue? Should this be a new feature in Specify?
The only work-around I can think of that is currently possible, is to have the exhibitions folks use the specify web portals (if you have them set up) to be able to search information from the different collections on the items they have. It’s not quite the solution you’re looking for but an option anyway.
Thanks for the tip! We’ve decided to create a separate collection just for Exhibitions and for those items of interest, we export these in csv format and import it into that collection using Workbench (or do it manually).
The problem with that is, however, that we’re using the same catalog numbers across all collections, meaning that this would clash with the numbers being repeated in that collection. There are of course several workarounds conceivable, such as turning off auto-numbering for the exhibits collection (if possible), or only use workbench for import and make sure that catalog numbers are not auto-generated. Alternately, we could create an isolated database just for Exhibitions.
we at the MfN Berlin have the similar challenge when it comes to Loans Management in Specify and we would like to reopen this topic for discussion:
I had a meeting today with my colleague from the Exhibition Loans department, and we discussed our intention to track loan management within Specify as part of the object history.
Currently, in the context of exhibition-related loans, items from multiple collections often come together. However, as far as I understand, Loans in Specify are configured at the Discipline level rather than at the Institution level. This setup seems to limit our ability to create a single Loan that includes objects from different collections.
I would like to ask if there is any existing way to configure Loans in Specify so that they can include objects from multiple collections.
If such functionality is not currently available, I would like to submit this as a feature request. It would be very helpful to have the ability to manage Loans at a higher level, enabling the creation of Loans that encompass items from multiple collections.
Thank you very much for your time and support. I look forward to your guidance on this matter.
Best regards,
Franziska from Natural History Museum Berlin
@Grant would be grateful for your feedback on this
It is true that Loan are currently scoped to the Discipline and that this is not currently configurable. At the moment, only Accession can be scoped to either the Institution or Division. This means that you cannot add objects from multiple collections across different disciplines, but you can add objects from multiple collections within the same discipline.
You need to create multiple loan records with the same identifier for each discipline to manage these objects across different collections. Other tables, such as Exchange In, Exchange Out, Accession, and Repository Agreement, are scoped at a higher level, but none serve the same purpose as Loan.
To achieve your goal, we need to make code changes on the software side. I have drafted this as a feature request for consideration in a future release:
If other institutions are interested, please let us know so we can add a note of support to this request! @fedoras, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this as well.
