ABSTRACT

Many national and international documentation and digitisation projects and procurement procedures describe an optimized information flow within museums and cultural institutions in order to keep the ever growing explosion of data manageable in a sensible way and allow simple data to be compiled and retrieved as meaningful information. At the same time the very same projects show an infinite desire for additional functionality, flexibility and personalisation. However all kinds of standards are needed. Standards for data entry, object description, procedures, data export and data import as well as for the technical format of data. While the museum professional should not be bothered too much with these guidelines and rules, the developers of museum management systems have a hard time to keep up with all these rapid developments and growing demands which are supported by this or that one system.Therefore the museum management system will meet demands of the growing number of standards and the education of museum professionals .

MUSEUM MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 1.1 Background to the study The history of National Museums of Kenya (NMK) dates back in 1910 when a museum was established in Nairobi by the then East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society [currently the East African Natural History Society (EANHS)]. The group consisted mainly of colonial settlers and naturalists who needed a place to keep and preserve their collections of various specimens. Its first site was at the present Nyayo House. The site soon became small and a larger building was put up in 1922 where the Nairobi Serena Hotel stands. It was not until 1929 that the colonial government set aside land at the Museum Hill and construction work started at the current site. It was officially opened in Sept. 22 1930 and named Coryndon Museum in honour of Sir Robert Coryndon, one time Governor of Kenya and a staunch supporter of Uganda Natural History Society. On the attainment of independence in 1963, it was renamed NMK. Since 1960s, NMK has expanded its services and assets to include Regional Museums, and has acquired under its jurisdiction Sites and Monuments which the Government has set aside as monuments of national heritage. Each of the Regional Museums has its own identity and develops its own programmes. The museum has also established Collaborations, Research and Development programmes, for instance, the Institute of Primate Research and RISSEA. The expansion of its mandate and the staff numbers coupled with the dynamic environment in which NMK operates has put enormous challenges for the institution. In order to keep abreast with changes in the environment in which it is operating, NMK had to redefine its operations to become more responsive to the changing circumstances. This meant moving towards developing museum as a place where people from all walks of life meet and have dialogue on various socio-economic issues. It called for NMK to develop programmes that promote cultural dynamism in order to build a sense of nationhood and belonging. 1.2 Statement of the problem The National Museums of Kenya (NMK) is a multi-disciplinary institution whose role is to collect, preserve, study, document and present Kenya s past and present cultural and natural heritage. This is for the purposes of enhancing knowledge, appreciation, respect and sustainable utilization of these resources for the benefit of Kenya and the world, for now and posterity.NMK is therefore linked to many museums around the nation for efficient provision of these services. The museums are scattered in different provinces hence there is a need for a form of centralization in order to identify the various resources available in the different museums. This need to centralize the data collected regarding the individual museums has provided the need for development of the museum management system. 1.3 Purpose of the study Most of the museums in Kenya are scattered in different regions of the country. When data is collected from the different museums, the records are kept in files that pile up and waste space. It is also difficult to retrieve these records since the files are in large volumes. The records also need to be available to the NMK offices so that they can be able to promote conservation and sustain utilization of national heritage through generation, documentation and dissemination of research and collection management knowledge, information and innovations which is their mission. This

therefore calls for a need to have a museum management system that that will enhance keeping of the records from the different museums at a central point so that any information needed for research and management of historical records can easily be retrieved 1.4 Objectives of Museum Management System(MMS) y y y Provide convenient way of keeping and managing records. Centralize records. Enhance research.

LITERATURE REVIEW

The earliest museum automation traces to the late 1960 s, when the Met used mainframe IBMs to give museum staff access to collection information. Collection management systems were designed around the needs of back-office staff who were continually editing data records about museum objects. Many are stale, ugly, yet highly functional legacy systems that run on old Windows PCs, saving data on a server which the museum keeps in a broom closet. Since the late 1990 s and the growth of the Internet, collection management software had a new job: to also make collections available to museum users (the museum without walls). The challenge was that the server in the broom closet was not designed to host millions of hits from the internet, so vendors created separate web modules to make put the collection on the web. At the same time, with the explosion of digital images and video, a new software genre, for managing digital assets, was born. Now, since many objects are photographed, the line between collection management and digital asset management is blurred. The newest revolution is in mobile devices. There too, a line is blurring, as handheld audio tours and online collections can draw data from the same database. (http://www.idea.org/blog/2011/04/07/collection-managementsystems-museums-and-the-web-2011/). However it is highly interesting to follow the changes in museum management and collection management over the last two decades. While in the late 80s and early 90s computer technology and data storage was still expensive and the very first documentation systems focused exclusively on the main inventory and the scientific documentation of cultural objects, nowadays museum missions focus much more on visitor- and user-experiences, participation, networking and collaboration between cultural heritage institutions. Internal procedures are supposed to get streamlined, workflow optimized, communication faster and better today it is absolutely not uncommon, that museum managers expect a collection management software to serve as tool enhancing the productivity of their employees and to serve as a tool to reduce cost per exhibition. Information aggregation and extensive re-use of data in different settings and products is meant to save time and money, while improving the quality of the museums work at the same time.Many of the new paradigms of museum management and museum services actually developed directly out of the ever expanding possibilities of computer hardware and software something like social tagging would be unthinkable without internet. And the

expectations grow at least with the same speed as the technology changes and expand into more and more work spaces.( Bayless, Jonathan: 1995 "Designing Critical Habitat for Collections
Use,").