Vernon Cataloguing

  • Featuring some of our clients and few of the artifacts from their collections
  • image of artifact

  • Client

    Campbelltown City Bicentennial Art Gallery
    Campbelltown, NSW, Australia

    Description

    Fonika Vervoorn-Booth, Self reflection and tools of my trade, 1993

Person File

Person is a database designed to handle both historic and contemporary people and companies, corporate bodies and groups of people such as tribes. Person types can be defined (individual, couple, family, museum, company, studio, etc). Names are fielded into elements such as title, first names, known as, last names, post-nominals. Any number of name types can be defined (preferred, acronyms, common names, short forms, etc). When searching for a person, any one or combination of these names will find that person. To avoid the creation of duplicate records the system has a sophisticated and configurable algorithm to warn you of existing records which could match the one you are creating.

The file accommodates:

  • Relationships to other people (e.g. son of, mother of)
  • Genealogies - If you define relationships like Parent and Child then the system can calculate and report all Ancestors and Descendants
  • Multiple addresses and contact numbers
  • People related to objects, donor information, staff information
  • Mailing Lists
  • Rich biographical fields going well beyond nationality and life-years. A full curriculum vitae can be entered from any aspect: professional; personal; educational; historic significance.

The system also keeps track of all the roles played by each person in the database.

Each time a person is linked to any other record its role is recorded and counted. In the Person Role window you can see at a glance all these roles, and a double-click on any role takes you to that file with the records for that person in that role. This is invaluable for easily answering that question ′What do you have in your collection that could be connected to my grandfather, Robert William Jones?′ It also means that at any time you can easily retrieve people by their roles ′ e.g. find all the donors or artists or lenders.