Gestion Informatique Documentaire

Anne Médard-Blondel, Director and Sylvie Pichard, Collection Management Assistant, present the Collections computerization project:

“The NHM of Marseille, labelled Musée de France, is a public establishment, created in 1819. Throughout almost two whole centuries, it has gathered inestimable evidence of natural heritage which it puts at the disposition of the public and of scientists in one of the most prestigious monuments in Marseille, the Longchamp Palais.
The museum has cultivated, from the very beginning, its Mediterranean specificity, in the domain of research as well as in the enrichment of its collections. Marseille’s situation, with a port that opens on to the Mediterranean, has allowed the transportation of specimens from all over the world.
Today, The Natural History Museum of Marseille has:

- 200 000 taxonomic species corresponding to two million samples (50% of which are regional),
- 60 000 scientific reviews and works,
- 30 employees, 4 of which are scientific, 6 are administrative, 4 are technical and 16 heritage officers (night and day surveillance),
- 82 000 Euros for the annual budget (not including salaries or infrastructure),
- 45 000 public admissions, thirty percent of which are from schools (Education service).

The Audit, then the Inventory and the computerisation of the collections constitute the museum’s priorities. As well as conforming to the Musée de France’s legal guidelines, the objective is to make the collections available using modern tools of communication.
Even if the inventories exist in paper form, created in various different time periods according to the various departments concerned, the computerisation of collections was started in 1996 but on a product that is now obsolete. Government guidelines today oblige the publication of an Inventory for all Musée de France collections and the establishment of such an Inventory necessitates database software that is adapted to the constraints of Natural Science collections.
The project of acquiring database software was carried out with the help of the IT council of Marseille (DSIT) under the direction of a specific team leader. He was responsible for the synthesis of the needs and particularities of the Museum’s project, the available resources and technical characteristics of the DSIT, and the definition of specifications. This project required a great deal of team work, a sharing of different skills and specialities, and a consideration of the various needs and constraints of the different directorships concerned.

Furthermore, a preservation assistant was recruited for the continuation of this project (concerning the parameters of the database and to monitor the input of data.)