Burnaby Art Gallery: Collection Management and Art Rental Systems
Andornot recently completed two projects for the Burnaby Art Gallery in Burnaby, British Columbia: one for the gallery's main collection and one for their art rental and sales program.
Collection Management System
The gallery's main collection is largely made up of works on paper by Canadian artists. Special consideration is given to the acquisition of multiples (e.g. original prints) and of works distinctly relevant to the citizens of Burnaby.
This collection was previously managed in a legacy database application only available to gallery staff. The gallery consulted with Andornot to replace the legacy system with TextWorks and to make the collection available on the web for public searching. The results of the project can be seen in the searchable database available on the gallery's website.
Notable features of the web portion of the project include:
- Alphabetical lists of artists included in the collection, for easy browsing.
- Quick links to artworks by popular artists and on popular topics (created using the Andornot Search Cannery).
- Thumbnail images of the artworks in the search results when available, with the ability to expand to a full-size image. This feature was enabled with the Andornot Image Handler with the benefit that administrators need only create a single image, and the Image Handler dynamically generates thumbnails as needed.
The desktop portion of the project provides a TextWorks interface for managing artworks, artists and exhibits and includes detailed fields for tracking conservation history.
Art Rental and Sales System
The gallery's popular art rental program provides individuals and organizations with access to contemporary works of art at very reasonable rates. The gallery was previously using two legacy applications to manage the artworks available in the program and the financial aspects of rentals and sales.
With a successful implementation of CS/TextWorks for the gallery's main collection complete, it was a natural extension to investigate using TextWorks for art rental management as well.
Darrin Martens, curator of the gallery, explains: "We wanted to make more use of the Inmagic software we already use to manage our collection and retire two older applications that weren't meeting our needs. The TextWorks databases that Andornot created are terrific and save us a great deal of time each month in managing art rentals."
Andornot's solution supports the management of artworks, artists, and clients, processing of rental and sale transactions, monthly and quarterly billing, and generation of annual client and artist statements. All functions and information related to the art rental program are now available in one set of linked databases, accessible to the staff who need it.
Contact us to learn how you can use TextWorks to manage your gallery's collection or art rental program, or any other information repository.