Questor Development Strategy

A practical approach to collection automation

Questor offers a flexible, practical approach to collection automation, whether for large or small organizations with collections of artifacts and objects. Through consultation and discussion, we strive to find the best automation solution for our clients' needs. We’ve seen a a growing tendency toward standardization in order to best control costs, but there can be great discrepancies between the types of data to be managed. Collecting organizations have generally either pursued standardization at the cost of suppressing diverse needs, or created custom systems at great expense.

Questor has adopted a design approach that avoids the pitfalls of both the generic and the custom approaches. We provide a system that is both compliant with industry standards, and allows clients to configure their systems to address unique needs. Our ARGUS system is so flexible that all our changes to the underlying application are insulated from changes made by clients, allowing your non-programmers to customize and maintain the system without depending on already stretched IT resources, and with no customization fees, while still allowing us to make system upgrades in the background.

ARGUS observes museum collection management standards proposed by the major professional European, American, and Canadian professional associations. These can be roughly divided into three categories.

Data Standards: the museum community lacks universally accepted guidelines for cataloging. Variety in collections has prevented adoption of cross-content standards, and specific disciplines have variant needs for which no standards have gained acceptance. This is increasingly true as one looks beyond art collections to more diverse material culture in historical and ethnographic collections, and in natural science repositories. There are field-level standards which museums consider, such as Spectrum, CIDOC, and the Dublin Core. These standards attempt to identify a common "core" of fields to serve as "universals" for most collections. Because record types and fields are so flexible in ARGUS, the software can readily comply with these basic guidelines while also accommodating local preferences.

Cataloging Standards: Cataloging standards are broadly defined as the selection of words and concepts to be entered in given fields to ensure consistency between collections. A well-designed system should allow the user to implement standards within any field. The ARGUS flexible data model and data control features allow users to comply with standard cataloging criteria by implementing a variety of database controls and on-line help prompts.

Authority Standards: Authority control standards are a conceptual extension of cataloging standards because they provide authorities for a specific field or set of fields. Authorities may be locally written, or integrated within a database as pre-structured tables. Using ARGUS, an institution could create its own condition codes and require that one of those codes be used (locally created authority) or use a predefined set of codes for the same purpose. In addition, ARGUS users may create their own lexicon --often called controlled (or structured) vocabularies – in order to enhance searching on local collections. Local terms may also be added to a lexicon to augment standard authorities with local variants.

Information architecture

The core ARGUS platform has long been viewed as a software standard in the artifact collection management field, and other providers have often used technology strategies pioneered by Questor. We continue to pursue our goal of IT leadership in our market so that we can continue to offer the collecting community a product that incorporates the most useful proven benefits of new technology. Our clients can be assured that whenever we introduce upgrades or new applications, they have been soundly tested, represent the best solution available, and incorporate a migration path that adapts when technology advances.

Research and Development: Our R&D strategy anticipates a number of factors critical to success.

• Expanded use by academic and museum-based specialists.
• Compliance with the highest level of open system standards.
• Incorporation of the latest technical and museum standards.
• Continued use of technology innovations pioneered by Questor.
• Development of software that can integrate multiple forms of information.

Questor has actively sought out partnerships and collaborative efforts that will enhance our product offerings and provide better services and solutions to our clients. Our integration with SydneyPLUS represents a significant step forward with this strategy.