Write a commentYou may not immediately notice, but as of July 2026, you're looking at a brand-new website. It may look and feel very similar to the previous version of the website, but most of the information presented comes from our brand-new collection management system, Accession.
History of this website
In 2013, we moved from a small rental home to an old farmhouse. My collection, which previously sat in some storage units I rented, could now finally get a proper space where I could work on repairs and turn the collection into something that resembles a private museum.
In 2014, I christened the museum the Vaxbarn, and registered the vaxbarn.com domain name. I picked the name Vaxbarn because the collection consisted mostly of a lot of small VAX systems, and was housed in a barn. I already had some information about my collection in a few wikipages, so I migrated that information to the new website, and started writing some articles about interesting systems in the collection.
In 2016, I felt that with the larger space, it was necessary to become a bit more meticulous about cataloging the collection. I decided to link this project to the website, so that the museum catalog would become the source of truth for descriptions of systems on the website. I created a database with a fairly crude management surface, and started by migrating some information I had in various Excel sheets into the database, followed by a physical inventory that took many months to complete.
In 2018, I added functionality to the database to keep track of documentation, software, and spare parts. Many more months of taking inventory followed.
By 2026, the database was becoming unmanageable; the crude management interface was getting cumbersome and slow, and I dreaded adding more features to it.
The need for a new Collection Management System
So, in 2026 I decided to build a new collection management system. I wanted to keep the features I liked about the old system - a taxonomy tree consisting of classes, and a tree of items to describe their physical location; relationships between classes, and a generalized attribute system for classes and items with optional inheritance - while adding functionality and at the same time improving performance and usability.
The new functionality is mainly around accountability; the old system was good at describing what was where, but not at describing how it got there. It lacked functionality to describe items that were not yet - or no longer - part of the collection. I wanted the new system to be able to track an item from the moment someone sent me an email "Hey, I have an XYZ you might be interested in", through it's actual acquisition, through being moved to a different area in the museum, through repairs, and perhaps through to letting go of the item and giving it to a friend, or loaning it to another museum for a period.
Spectrum
Rather than re-invent the wheel, I decided to take a look at Spectrum (https://collectionstrust.org.uk/spectrum/). Spectrum is a world-wide standard for museum collections management. It describes standards for several procedures that accredited museums need to meet, with suggested implementations that meet those standards. Even though we're not an accredited museum, I figured these well-established procedures would be a good starting point. So far, I've implemented all nine of the Spectrum primary procedures (object entry, acquisition and accessioning, location and movement control, inventory, cataloguing, object exit, loans in, loans out, and documentation planning), and two of the twelve non-primary procedures: condition checking and technical assessment, and collections care and conservation. Note that these may not be full implementations that meet the standards, they're mostly practical workflows that work for me.
Cases
Rather than making ad-hoc changes to the database for every change everything in Accession is handled through cases. Cases cover the Spectrum procedures. So, when someone offers me a new item for the collection, I create an "object entry" case (one case can of course cover multiple objects). If the object entry case results in an acquisition, an "accession" case is automatically created, which may in turn lead to moving, inventory, documentation, condition checking and cataloguing cases.