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 for the scholarly management of museum collections. Fourteen linked record types, customisable fields, Getty and Wikidata vocabularies built in, used 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.
CollectiveAccess is open source (GPL licence, public code on GitHub), no per-user fee, your service provider is interchangeable. Proprietary vendors typically charge per user or per module, and the code stays opaque. At equivalent functionality on scholarly management, 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 carried out migrations from FileMaker, Excel, AtoM, Omeka and proprietary museum platforms. The handover relies on the structured exports the source system provides (XML, CSV, SQL dump). For older or heavily customised bases, an upfront audit defines what is migrated as-is, transformed or re-keyed. See our dedicated migration page for the method.
Yes. We support sites with a few hundred objects (small thematic museums) up to several hundred thousand records (national collections, multi-site institutions). The MySQL backend and the modular architecture allow the same software to fit both ends of the spectrum, with hosting sized accordingly.
CollectiveAccess is developed by Whirl-i-Gig (New York) since 2003, distributed under GPL v3, with a public roadmap on GitHub and an active community of integrators in Europe and North America. The code is exportable to standard MySQL at any time — your data is never locked in, regardless of who maintains your instance.
Yes. CollectiveAccess natively stores high-definition images (up to 100 MB per file, RAW formats accepted), generates IIIF manifests, embeds the Mirador viewer and allows image annotations (regions, zooms). Each photograph stays linked to its context — depicted artwork, photographer, rights, capture date, intended use. The scholarly photo library (work shots for publication, restoration documentation) lives in the same base as the historical image collection (older photographs documenting the collection itself, photographer fonds). Real cases: Charleroi Museum of Photography (collection of historical and contemporary prints, institution dedicated to photography), Musée Malartre (vehicles photographed + 3D scans integrated into the records), Institut pour la Photographie des Hauts-de-France (documentary base on the history and practice). No need for a dedicated DAM (Phraseanet, Cumulus) alongside — the photo library is integrated into collection management.
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