Digital Collection Orchestrator

“With the advent of the internet and advancing technology infrastructure, business as well as how we gain information has been transformed tremendously. The internet is used widely in the first instance as a means of gaining knowledge and then for doing business. More and more, cultural institutions such as museums and galleries are focusing on being able to share their knowledge base on the internet, as well as to enable organisations that they deal with on a commercial basis to easily integrate with them through this medium”.

Piction’s Digital Collection Orchestrator™ (dCO™) platform provides an intelligent layer that can integrate with existing collection management systems and other business systems (such as financials). With Digital Collection Orchestrator™ museums are able to provide greater access to their collections – no matter what format.

Piction bridges the gap between traditional collection management systems and the new paradigm.

Control the user communities that can access the collection base.

Museums are able to create user communities that can access all or subsets of the collection base. Furthermore the “business rules” of how these user groups do business with the collection base are also encapsulated within Piction. Advanced security features are also available.

Provide a platform for gaining additional knowledge by enabling indigenous collection object owners to add value to the metadata whilst ensuring the defined organisational metadata is kept intact.

Comprehensive metadata structures are created by museums to document and contextualise collection objects. With Piction, museums are able to create supersets of metadata that can sit on top of their current metadata structures. This allows a museum to add further knowledge value to their collection base by enabling other groups to input value added information. For example, remote indigenous communities can access the collections relevant to them. They might see a photograph of a number of tribe members of which they are nameless. However someone from that community knows who the people are as well as the context. They can add this knowledge back to the museum through Piction.

Gain new revenue channels by commercialising digital based collections. Create “product sets” from the digital collections.

Automating the commercialisation of collection objects has always been a daunting task. Digital Collection Orchestrator™ enables museums to easily define price books and products that are based on their collection objects. These can then be attached to the various user communities. A person(general public) that browses the collection base may see a photograph that they may wish to purchase. Automatically, products associated with the general public will appear such as prints ie 5X7 or poster sized prints. Alternatively it could be a publication group that wants to license an image for use and have this delivered digitally.

Automate internal and external supplier workflow.

With Piction, museums can define workflow sets appropriate to various user requests. This maximises efficiency by automating requests and/or mundane administrative tasks such order form completion etc.

Comprehensive management reports on collection usage.

Management reports such as cost of production, order reconciliations, royalties/commissions tracking, supplier order reports, internal cross charging, collection usage reports and a host of others are available.

Integrate schools, bus companies, tourist operators into a single booking system.

Piction has a complete booking system that can be configured to suit educational, bus and tourist operators. A diary can be setup that is linked to various programmes defined by the museum. Schools and other groups can then access these and book and pay in advance.