We're running (have run) out of space at work for our collections of archaeological finds from digs etc. It'd be good to maybe try and develop an online system that we could pass on to placement students to essentially go through the collection, fill in the required fields, and photograph each piece. Once we've documented the stuff sufficiently it should be easier to get rid of the physical items and make some space.

I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions? Is it wishful thinking that there may be something out there designed with this in mind? I don't want to go down a CMS route and have to heavily modify something that wasn't quite intended for this purpose. I'd probably rather actually try and do the sql etc myself if it came to that!

The requirements are:

Has to be flexible enough for us to have pretty much any fields/records we want
lots of photos (multiple of same thing from different angles etc)
easy for someone to enter the data in
easy to search and present data, in different ways (show results from one site, show all items of this type, show items from this era etc)

Any help greatly appreciated!

That's what I was thinking, though I figured it's that oldschool there must be several open source options out there that handle all the dirtywork for you?

the uni doesn't have anything like this at the moment, mostly due to the red tape you have to go through to get the IT temperature to do anything. This is why I'm looking in to it, to make a point. The 'proper'  way would be to request that IT make this system and give them a spec if they agree to do it,  and then agree a price, likely a few thousand pounds. 6-9 months later we might get a half baked product that doesn't do half the things we need as the uni systems aren't compatible etc.

on the other hand for the same kind of money I could likely knock something better together with limited knowledge and time, and register a domain and pay for hosting for a decade for it on external servers that aren't restricted in the slightest.  It could all be done in  the time it would take IT to respond to the initial request.

I started to look in to library systems etc.  They look like an option,  would just need categories etc renaming.



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Doubtful, it really needs to be fairly customisable and open as we'll no doubt need to create several ways of sorting and viewing data with associated info. I'll look in to some open source options for a while I think. I've been told we need to try the "proper" route first before I go on with this. So we'll put a request in and in a month I'll be back to start looking again...