Rationale and history
Keepthinking has been working with museums, collections, art galleries, libraries, archives and other kinds of cultural institutions for over ten years. We have created websites, implemented content management systems, integrated many collection management systems and designed kiosks and mobile applications.
Over the course of time, a few trends started to emerge in our work and in our dealing with our customers.
For a start, we discovered that most museums manage information in an extremely segmented way. In many cases, they employ a series of vertical software applications to manage different facets of their information. They have a 'system' to manage their collection (which may well be paper based, or a series of Excel spreadsheets - up to very sophisticated applications), a tool to control their website (if they have one), event and exhibition managements, contacts and newsletters... and many more - to various degrees of complexity.
Each system is typically vertical - in the sense that they do not talk or interact with each other - and each system only addresses a part of the whole. No tool or database usually oversees a museums' whole content and deals with it in a more integrated way.
Beside the lack of any holistic approach, multiple software applications also mean separate licenses, more training due to different interfaces and more maintenance and integration costs.
On the other hand, many museums (typically small and medium size ones) either don't have a website, or have a poor quality one, or one that is difficult to update and maintain. Very few are able to publish their collections online, in any capacity.
There are many reasons for this: time, cost and expertise and among the most common.
Museums Sites was created as a solution to all this: a holistic approach to manage and publish museum information: all of it. Please look at the amazing set of features to find out more.