Purchase of and Migration to New Collections Management Software
To improve collections care and management through an updated collections management system.
To improve collections care and management through an updated collections management system.
$5,846,000 in fiscal year 2020 and $7,004,000 in fiscal year 2021 are for statewide historic and cultural grants to local, county, regional, or other historical or cultural organizations or for activities to preserve significant historic and cultural resources. Money must be distributed through a competitive grant process. The Minnesota Historical Society must administer the money using established grant mechanisms, with assistance from the advisory committee created under Laws 2009, chapter 172, article 4, section 2, subdivision 4, paragraph (b), item (ii).
Available upon request. Contact, grants@mnhs.org
Short Term: We've achieved most of our expected outcome in that patrons and researchers can access and search for information about our collection pieces through a link on our website. We had anticipated the entirety of our collection being available right away, but discovered that all our catalog records were automatically set to "not accessible to public" when our instance of CollectiveAccess was set up. However, since implementing CollectiveAccess, we have now made over 7,700 records available to the public. The fact that they are not all yet public actually works in our favor because a huge part of our collection consists of photographs, and we'd like to apply watermarks to them before allowing public access since reproduction of photos is a source of revenue for us.
Intermediate Term: We've achieved our expected outcome in that access is easier, content is greater, and items from our material artifact collection are included. The impact on patron requests seems limited at this point, but it is still early and we hope creating more awareness through social media posts and our website will generate more interest.
Long Term: We believe we are on our way to achieving the expected outcomes. We have already gained a sense of greater intellectual control as we clean up records and make connections across records. Non collections staff members have begun using the system to identify material for presentations. We expect this to grow over time as we continue to use the program and work through all our catalog and collections records.
Available upon request, grants@mnhs.org