opwmatters
Art and Heritage Collections System Project (AHCS) Michael Duffy,
Estate Management System Unit
The Office of Public Works (OPW) is the custodian of one of the largest and most important public collections of cultural assets in the country. Rich and diverse collections of fine art, decorative objects, furniture, economic botany, printed books and archives are held within Government offices, embassies, historic structures and parklands. The majority of these assets are nationally and internationally significant and, in many cases, irreplaceable and priceless. A complex, multi-phased project entitled the Art and Heritage Collections System Project (AHCS) is underway to enable OPW to centrally manage and account for the records of hundreds of thousands of the above-mentioned cultural assets. The OPW consolidated existing standalone Adlib databases plus the Art Management Access Database into a single centralised webenabled enterprise class system (Phase 1). As part of the overall project, existing bespoke MS-Access databases and Excel files are also being migrated to the new system (Phase 1 & 3). An ambitious cataloguing and digitisation programme is planned in Phase 3 to provide a unified system for the whole of Heritage Services. Responsibility for managing the various collections is currently divided between a number of business areas within the organisation. This is to ensure that each OPW business area can manage the assets it is responsible for in isolation. It was important that these administrative boundaries be reflected within the new system. Phase 1 is now complete with 15 sites live on the newly implemented AHCS. In total 53,604 records have been migrated from the State Art and Heritage Services Collections. Phase 2 is currently underway and involves defining data standards, cleaning existing data sets and delivering a suite of user policies and procedures. The ultimate goal is to record every object within our properties on the system and to make these publically available through an outward facing portal.
Some benefits of this project include: • Governance and custodial control of heritage assets • Easily accessible data for cultural assets • One centralised repository for the cultural asset data • Legacy systems decommissioned • Supporting the ICT Strategy 2018- 2020 and the Built Heritage Services objective • Significantly improved data on our cultural assets, in terms of its accuracy and granularity which will support:
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management decisions
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key performance indicators
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answering the growing amount of audit queries and other queries
• Faster performance • More secure and robust system • Improved functionality • Improved customer engagement and service • Transparency on cultural asset management activity O’Connell Exhibition ›
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