From scholarly inventory to public-facing website, from the ten-yearly inventory check to exhibition loans. An open-source collection management base, already deployed at Musée de France-labelled institutions.
Four needs, one base
A museum's daily curatorial work breaks down into four families of tasks. CollectiveAccess covers them in a single interface — no third-party plugin, no parallel base.
Core of the museum work
Detailed cataloguing of works: authors, datings, provenance, materials and techniques, dimensions, condition. Custom fields without touching the code, controlled vocabularies (Getty, Wikidata, AAT, Joconde) built in.
Works on the move
Tracking of locations (storage, galleries, external loans), incoming and outgoing loans, condition reports before and after transport, exhibition calendar. Direct link between the object record and the history of its movements.
The regulatory lock for Musées de France
In-house museesDeFrance plugin: inventory line lock after recording, registers compliant with French Ministry of Culture standards, ten-yearly inventory check, statutory reports auto-generated. Used by Musée de France-labelled institutions.
From base to public site
The Pawtucket interface turns the internal database into a public-facing website, with no double entry. Online catalogues, virtual exhibitions, educational content all fed by the scholarly records.
Six building blocks CollectiveAccess brings to museums, already in production at our clients.
Objects, works, places, events, people, collections, exhibitions, loans, condition reports, donors, documentary sources, editorial content. All linked to one another.
Adding a donation number, an internal classification or a local reference set is done in the admin interface, no developer needed. The schema stays maintainable over time.
Photos up to 100 MB per image, RAW formats, native IIIF for delivery. Image annotations (regions, zooms), multiple versions (study, press, exhibition), automatic thumbnails.
museesDeFrance plugin: inventory check campaigns, object-by-object traceability, exports compliant with France's Ministry of Culture, statutory reports in regulatory format. No more parallel Excel spreadsheets next to the base.
POP (the French national heritage portal), Joconde, Wikidata, EAD, MARC, XLSX, CSV, XML. Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons connector for institutions that opt for openness.
Interface in 8+ languages, multilingual records (FR/EN by default, extensible), RGAA compliance for public-facing delivery via Pawtucket.
The French label imposes precise rules. Our in-house museesDeFrance plugin implements them in the database.
Legal framework of the French « Musée de France » statutory label: collections belong to the public domain, inalienability, scholarly mission, public access.
Every ten years, physical verification of each work in the register. idéesculture's museesDeFrance plugin: campaigns, per-object status, statutory reports in the format required by the Ministry of Culture.
Inventory register in the statutory format, lines locked after recording, edits tracked. Compliant with the requirements of France's Ministry of Culture (museum service).
Mapping to the French national nomenclature, publication on the POP heritage portal. Handled natively by the plugin.
What comes up in the first conversations with a museum's curatorial team.
CollectiveAccess is the best-established open-source option in France for the scholarly management of museum collections. Fourteen linked record types, customisable fields, Getty and Wikidata vocabularies built in, French Musée de France compliance via idéesculture's in-house plugin. In use at municipal, regional, national and private museums for over ten years.
For full scholarly cataloguing (works, movements, loans, condition reports, exhibitions), CollectiveAccess is the reference. For simpler projects focused on public publication, Omeka may suffice. For historical archives tied to the museum, ICA-AtoM is more natural. The right choice depends on the depth of curatorial work expected — we run that audit for free.
Yes — and that's officially verifiable. CollectiveAccess and idéesculture's museesDeFrance plugin are listed by France's Ministry of Culture on culture.gouv.fr, with two certifications: computerised inventory registers (Dec 2013) and ten-yearly inventory check functionalities (Jan 2014). The plugin enforces the regulatory lock (inventory line non-editable after recording), handles the ten-yearly inventory check, produces statutory reports and compliant registers. The direct Joconde export from the plugin is being certified, with the Mayenne Museum as the first deployment. Deployed at Musée de France-labelled institutions: Musée André Voulgre, COR Ouest Rhodanien, Musée Malartre.
CollectiveAccess is open source (GPL licence, public code on GitHub), no per-user fee, your service provider is interchangeable. Proprietary vendors charge per user or per module, and the code stays opaque. At equivalent functionality on scholarly management and statutory compliance, the cumulative ten-year cost is generally lower on the open-source side — the initial investment being comparable.
It varies widely depending on collection size, level of support and chosen hosting. For a municipal museum with a few thousand objects and a five-person team, the initial investment (configuration, data migration, training, first-year hosting) typically falls between €15,000 and €40,000 net. Subsequent years are stable: no per-user licence, just hosting and maintenance. Ask us for a costed scope for your case.
Yes — idéesculture has already carried out several Micromusée → CollectiveAccess migrations (see our dedicated migration page). The handover relies on the XML and CSV exports Micromusée provides. For older or heavily customised bases, an upfront audit defines what is migrated as-is, transformed or re-keyed.
The museesDeFrance plugin opens an inventory check campaign, assigns a status to each object (seen on site, seen offsite, missing, destroyed, in restoration…), generates the statutory reports in the format the Ministry requires, and feeds the progress dashboard. Everything stays inside the database — no more parallel Excel spreadsheet quietly turning into the real inventory.
France's Ministry of Culture does not publish a precise statistic. On the idéesculture side, we support around thirty museums on CollectiveAccess since 2012, from municipal heritage sites to national museums, in mainland France, overseas territories and abroad. The full reference list is available on our References page.
Get in touch with idéesculture
Migration of your current base, CollectiveAccess configuration for your collections, team training, sovereign hosting, French statutory compliance. Free initial discussion, written scoping note you keep even if you decide to work with someone else.
Prise en main, autonomie, montée en compétence
Reprise de données, conversion, accompagnement
Serveurs dédiés, infogérance, sauvegardes
Inventaire, récolement, export Joconde
Plugins, intégrations, sur-mesure