A Side-By-Side Comparison of Museum Collection Management Platforms: CollectionSpace VS PastPerfect

The categories for comparison include:

• System Architecture
• Available Profiles
• User Interface
• Security
• Support
• Development
• Pricing
• Content Management

Let’s begin with a brief description of each MCM platform, derived directly from their web-pages, before moving on to our side-by-side comparisons.

CollectionSpace:

“CollectionSpace is a web-based, open source collections management and information system for museums and other collecting institutions. You can use it to manage your museum’s cataloging, acquisitions, loans, and many other activities.”

“The CollectionSpace team and community is made up of museum professionals, software engineers, and interaction designers.”

PastPerfect:

“PastPerfect is the world’s leading software program for collection and contact management. Over 9,000 organizations worldwide have achieved their goals using PastPerfect”

“It handles accessions, descriptive cataloging, loans, exhibits, capital campaigns, membership development, pledges, dues, donation receipts, research, lexicons, and reports.”

System Architecture

Profiles

Platform UI

* This is entirely subjective, ultimately it’s up to you to decide.

CollectionSpace UI:

PastPerfect UI:

In order to avoid any copyright infringement, we have chosen not to provide any screen-shots of the PastPerfect platform, but you can find many of them in the user manual found at http://pastperfect-online.com/webhelp/Chapters/PP5-6e.htm.

Security

Support

Public Facing Site

* The code for all available CS apps can be found on the UC Berkeley CSpace Django Project GitHub repository, found here.

** The page found at http://museumsoftware.com/ve_samples/basic/index.htm provides a basic online PP Virtual Exhibit.

Development

Pricing

* A 20% discount for Institutional Members of the American Association for State and Local History. A complete price list for PastPerfect can be found at http://museumsoftware.com/pricing.html.

Content Management

To be able to cover the content management capabilities of each platform, it would easily take an entire blog post for each. Even then, we still don’t think we’d be able to cover everything these platforms have to offer. Instead, we encourage you to explore each platform on your own. Both PastPerfect and CollectionSpace provide free demos for their individual platforms.

For CollectionSpace, you can try out all of the available profiles mentioned above in addition to various implementations of the public facing site simply by navigating to the following pages:

• CollectionSpace platform profile demos –  http://www.collectionspace.org/demo/
• UC Berkeley web app implementations –  https://webapps.cspace.berkeley.edu/

For PastPerfect, you can download and evaluate the latest release on a machine running the Windows OS, such as XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10, after completing their mandatory information form. The download page can be found by navigating to:

• PastPerfect free download and evaluation – http://www.museumsoftware.com/pp5eval.html

The Takeaway

When it boils down to making the ultimate decision on which platform to integrate into your organization, there are several major questions to consider. For example, to list only a few:

• How easy will it be to adapt and migrate our existing collection data?
• What are the short and long term costs associated with the platform and does it fit our budget?
• Is there a strong and active community surrounding the platform and its associated technologies?
• Does the current configuration support our existing needs?
• How easy will it be to customize our platform to our individual needs?
• Does it support our existing organizational workflows?
• Is it straightforward, user friendly, and likely to require minimal training of our staff?
• Can the platform be extended to web and mobile?
• Is the platform secure, reliable, etc..?

To summarize our findings, PastPerfect, built by PastPerfect Software, Inc., is a highly structured and reliable MCM platform that runs on a Microsoft Windows desktop, either locally, or over a Microsoft network. Various tools are provided to make migrations and web deployment relatively easy and simple. In addition, addons are available to extend the capabilities of your platform even further. The user documentation is extensive and well written. However, the facts that the platform and its addon features are only available at a cost, it is Microsoft dependent, lacks an available developer API, and the UI seems relatively outdated can be somewhat discouraging if these given facts are of value to you. Overall, PastPerfect’s reliability, features, and solid support may outshine these areas in which it lacks.

CollectionSpace, on the other hand, is an open source, community based, web application that provides a lot of freedom in who, what, and how it is configured. Of course, being an open source, community based application, its success relies heavily on the activity of the community and the support it receives through memberships, grants, donated developer time from universities and colleges, and stewardship by Lyrasis. The architecture and design is modern, flexible and highly capable. The platforms available features and various pre-configured profiles make it a very attractive option right out of the box. At its price point, we can only expect the platform’s popularity and support to increase within the foreseeable future.

We hope this post helps ease the headache that comes with having to make the decision on which Museum Collection Management platform to adopt.  If you have any questions regarding CollectionSpace and how it can meet your organization’s needs, please feel free to reach out as we would be happy to help (contact us). Also, we encourage your comments on anything discussed in this post.  Please, feel free to add your comment below.