hobbyDB & Museums – a perfect combination

Christian is one of the founders of the hobbyDB project and his musings share some of his collecting experience. He recently joined the board of Auto-Archives, a not-for-profit 501(c)3 organization.

I have been to more than 400 museums (I count personal collections that are extensive and displayed well into the category of a museum) as it is one of my favorite past-times. I also believe that hobbyDB can add value to museums as part of the collecting ecosystem by allowing easy cataloging and, more importantly, showcasing and sharing museums’ collections. For that purpose we are developing museum and large collection specific features (see hobbyDB’s roadmap for details).

Museums’ software today serves mainly one purpose, keeping an inventory and giving access to it to admins, here an example:

Museum Software packages are still stand-alone and not integrated into any other databases. As a first step to change this we like to give collectors and the public at large granular access to each item so that they know which museum has this particular item. Here a mock-up of a catalog entry showing which museum has the item in its collection:

Next would be custom profiles for museums. These pages would explain the museum’s philosophy and how to get access to their collections, such as “This item is in Room 8 on public view” or “This item is in the off-site archive, you need to give us two weeks notice and here is how”.

After that we plan to show all items in a particular museum with full search capabilities. We want to ensure that these digital presences are aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly, the same way museums work hard on their physical presentations (like the Mint Museum of Toys with the below gallery). Here the Mint Museum of Toys in Singapore whose founder Chang Yang Fa is a member of the hobbyDB Advisory Council -

Lastly, we plan to extend the Wish List functionality so that museums can ask for items to be donated, loaned on a long-time basis or just for an exhibition.

We have already started working with Auto-Archives and the Shelby American Collection to have their volunteers document these two collections (with an estimated total of 300,000 items) and are talking to five other museums about doing the same.

The American Shelby Collection not only houses the two most expensive American made cars but it also is a custodian to 10,000s of Shelby related documents:

These co-operations are free for museums, add tremendous value to what they are doing and help make hobbyDB’s vision of being the World’s Museum more of a reality!