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Britain’s first home for abandoned children holds a collection spanning art, music and social history. A single flexible library system now makes it accessible and searchable on the web.
The Foundling Museum’s collection includes books, fine art and music spanning centuries. Soutron provided a hosted, web-accessible library system flexible enough to handle the custom fields, thesaurus control and detailed cataloging that a collection of this complexity demands.
The Foundling Museum tells the story of the Foundling Hospital, London’s first home for abandoned children and of three major figures in British history: its campaigning founder the philanthropist Thomas Coram, the artist William Hogarth and the composer George Frideric Handel.
This remarkable collection of art and social history is now housed in a restored and refurbished building adjacent to the original site of the Hospital, demolished in 1926. The art collection includes works by Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough.
In 2005 Soutron was selected to supply a library system to provide cataloging facilities for the extensive historical collection of materials that have been placed in the care of the Museum. The demands for a catalog that includes books, art and music means that the database has to be very flexible to allow fields to be defined to cover the detail that is needed for such a collection. The need for thesaurus control is also an important aspect of the work of the library staff Katharine Hogg, Barbara Diana and Colin Coleman.
“We recognize that some organizations, whilst small in staff numbers, have the same quality demands as much larger organizations. Clients such as The Foundling Museum are very important to us and we try to help and support them the same as if they were one of our Global library clients” says Graham Partridge, Research & Development Director, Soutron Global.
“We chose this software because of its flexibility, which allows us to customize all our databases.”
Katherine Hogg
Librarian
The size of the catalog is not as great as say that of Random House Archives but the depth of cataloging is equally thorough. A typical library system is unable to cope with the extra demands to add and define new fields as necessary.
The Soutron solution manages this without the need for lots of IT Support and indeed does not require any specialist IT support to run.
Delivering results for museums and charities like the Foundling Museum. Talk to our team
Katharine Hogg, Librarian, The Foundling Museum said “We chose this software because of its flexibility, which allows us to customize all our databases to suit the items in the collection, and allows in-depth or even ‘extreme’ cataloging which our users require”.
The catalog can be seen at: www.soutron.com/foundling
To learn more about the Foundling Museum and their collections, visit their website at:
www.foundlingmuseum.org.uk
To find out how you can migrate to a fast, secure, cloud-based library and archive management system to support your museum collections, book a 20 minute discovery call with us today, see below.
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The first step is to learn more. Here's how we can answer your questions:
Yes. The Foundling Museum uses Soutron to catalog a mixed-format collection that includes books, artworks and music in a single database.
The system allows staff to define and add custom fields for each type of material, removing the need to maintain separate systems for different collection formats.
No. The Foundling Museum runs a detailed, web-accessible catalog without any specialist IT support.
Soutron supplies, hosts and maintains the system, meaning museum staff can focus on the collection rather than the infrastructure behind it.
Thesaurus control ensures that consistent, standardized vocabulary is used across a catalog, so researchers find what they are looking for regardless of how a term is phrased. For a collection as varied as the Foundling Museum's, spanning centuries of art, music and social history, thesaurus control is essential to making the catalog reliable and accurate for specialist users.
Yes. The Foundling Museum's full catalog is publicly accessible on the web through Soutron's hosted platform. Researchers anywhere in the world can search a collection that includes works connected to Thomas Coram, William Hogarth and George Frideric Handel, without needing to visit the museum in person.