Painless Collection Management
Painless Collection Management
Streamlined administration for your Collection Management System
Collection management systems are powerful tools for archivists, librarians, and collection managers alike, but to take full advantage of these systems we understand that administrators cannot be restricted by time consuming, complex managerial tasks.
Painless collection management is a core value of the Recollect platform, leading to our talented developers implementing an array of features to remove the complexity and stress from collection administration.
New features are constantly implemented into the Recollect platform, along with consistently enhanced existing functionality, to ensure the Recollect Collection Management System remains an industry leader. Below you’ll find a few of these highlighted features, providing your organization with a painless collection management experience.
Simple Uploads, Streamlined Edits
Uploading and editing your collections' records should be simple - Recollect makes sure it is.
From uploading a new collection with accompanying metadata, to making a series of simple item changes or applying bulk updates to thousands of records, our streamlined administrative processes allow collection managers to organize their digital archive with ease.
Simplifying the content management process means organizations can guarantee accuracy, ensuring both new and existing collections items are consistently providing their audience with correct information.
With ever-expanding collections and new information consistently available, Recollect makes sure you’re able to make the necessary changes to your collections, stress-free.
Custom Item Configuration
Follow an established metadata structure, or create your own.
Metadata is the key to creating a highly discoverable collection. Creating your own metadata structure for each record type ensures simple organization, provides contextual connections, and allows the freedom for you to comply to a pre-determined metadata structure or create a structure specific to your needs.
This unique feature of the Recollect platform ensures heritage material can be organized simply, new items can be easily categorized, and your organization can adapt their digital collection to your audience’s needs. Combining this flexible metadata standard with Recollect’s advanced discovery functionality, your collection will boast an industry-leading user experience for both administrators and your collections audience.
User Access Control and Role Management
Let your stakeholders, community, and public audience see what they need.
Managing a digital collection is not always a one-person operation.
By establishing administrators, editors, and if required, moderators, you can ensure the right people have relevant access to manage, view, edit, and administer the site. This role management is included with each tier of our subscription model, meaning you always have the right access required for the task.
We understand you may not want all your content publicly available. For these scenarios, our access control lists provide a high level of control over viewing restrictions. When your collections hold items restricted to a specific audience, access control lists allow administrators to determine which users are able to view which sites.
Cloud-based Access
Manage your digital collection, anywhere, anytime.
As an entirely cloud-based platform, Recollect allows administrators to manage their digital collection through a browser from any location, at any time. Removing the need to download applications or software onto a specific computer, using a cloud-based platform ensures your CMS is consistently up to date, removes strain on your IT infrastructure, and provides a more fluid CMS management experience.
Cloud-based access also provides administrators with the ability to manage their collection through their smartphone or tablet, allowing collection management tasks to be completed wherever, whenever you choose.
Making administrative tasks simple is not restricted to these features. Recollect’s advanced CMS functionality include a large variety of features to ensure a positive administration experience. To learn more about Recollect’s administrative capabilities, plus the number of additional benefits provided with our demonstration, visit our Feature Hub below.
Alternatively, fill out our Recollect Journey Survey below to have a member of our team reach out and begin a conversation as to whether Recollect’s CMS platform is a good fit for your archive and special collections.
Simple Subscription
Simple Subscription
Tailored Subscriptions and Dynamic Scalability ensuring you have the features you need, as you need them.
The Recollect platform emphasizes flexibility, meeting our customers’ needs at every turn. To reflect this, we’ve adopted a tiered subscription system for our Software-as-a-Service model, providing your organization with the exact Collection Management System features you need, as you need them.
The tiered subscription system takes account of your needs, priorities, budget, and individual collection requirements with a subscription that suits you.
Our subscription page includes a comprehensive table comparing each of our subscription tiers, and the relevant benefits, features, and modules. To compare our available tiers, click here.
Core Functionality, without Compromise
Recollect’s priority is to provide a modern Collection Management System that equips archive and collection managers with effective, flexible management tools while supporting their audience with community engagement functionality.
Regardless of the subscription tier, your Recollect CMS will include our entire suite of core functionality, each of which being associated with our core values.
Discover Access Engage Manage Preserve
Content Management and Collection Discovery tools, User Management functionality, and all the benefits of a SaaS platform are included with each subscription, providing an industry-leading Collection Management System tailored to each customer, regardless of scope.
Professional, Enterprise, and Building your CMS
Recollects’ base tier, Professional, is tailored for organisations looking to manage small-to-medium sized collections. With full access to the platforms core functionality, our Professional tier exceeds the expectations associated with a modern digital collection management platform.
Organizations with larger, more complex collections may opt to select one of our highly configurable Enterprise options. University, academic and state libraries, public bodies, local government, city councils and other organizations with complex archives tend to take advantage of the Enterprise subscriptions to leverage the advanced benefits the tier provides, such as an increased storage capacity, custom site design, and advanced site configuration capabilities. Each of the Enterprise tiers, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus, and Enterprise Max have increasingly advanced and bespoke functionality.
Beginning at Enterprise Plus customers are able to take advantage of Recollect Modules, such as our Exhibition, Data Warehouse, and Digital Preservation Modules. A full list of Modules is available on our subscription page.
Dynamic Scalability
We understand that as an organization’s collection expands, their needs to effectively maintain their collection (along with an assured desire to continue growth through community engagement) will also change. Among the benefits of a SaaS platform is dynamic scalability, removing the need to restrict your organization to a specific CMS configuration. When required, additional storage, features, and modules can be implemented into your site.
It's not always easy to determine what type of CMS makes sense for your collection. If you’d like to start a conversation with Recollect, fill out the survey below and a member of our team will be in touch to examine your collection, determine what configuration may be best for you, and provide advice moving forward. To view a comprehensive comparison of Recollect’s subscription offerings, visit our subscription page below.
Understand your Collection's Audience
Understand your Collection's Audience
Build a Collection Management System tailored to your audience’s needs.
Professionals in the archive and collection management field are acutely aware of their collection’s importance. They can hold insightful records sought by historians, images providing a glimpse into a local communities past, or academic journals providing context to future intellectual pursuits.
Regardless of what your collections audience may be seeking, the ability to effectively convey and share the items in your collection is vital to providing a positive user experience for any visitor, and for communicating the value you hold.
To ensure this information is effectively communicated to your audience, Recollect works with you, applying human-centered design principles as a cornerstone of the implementation of your collection management system. Incorporated as a strategy for building a user-first experience, human-centered design is a concept that considers the specific needs of the target user when designing the interactive system.
Recollect Workshops and Shaping your CMS
The process of incorporating human-centered design into your Recollect-based collection management system is supported by multiple workshops, conducted during the discovery phase of Recollect implementation. The Persona workshop provides the opportunity for us to work with you to create a common understanding of the key internal users and external audience of your CMS, exploring why the groups are important to you, and how and what they access within the collection.
The Data workshop provides a detailed understanding of your data, including how it is going to be structured for both your purposes and for your audiences to enable rich access and engagement, and explores process of data cleansing and transformation.
The User Experience workshop brings together the understanding of the persona and the data design to configure the discovery pathways of your Recollect platform. This will guide the configuration of the home page and other entry points to your collections, including finding aids, highlighted collections, and other valuable functionality.
Our website holds many resources relating to the implementation of the Recollect site, and how our unique functionality can empower your collections and engage your community. Navigate to our Features page to learn more about the platform, or if you’d like to have a member of the Recollect team reach out to you, fill out the Recollect Journey survey below and a Recollect representative will reach out shortly.
Simplify Digital Preservation
Simplify Digital Preservation
Preserve your digital records, stress-free.
Digital preservation is necessary to ensure ongoing to access to cultural heritage collections in an increasingly digital world. There is a misconception that digital objects do not need to be preserved because they do not decay or degrade in the same manner as their physical counterparts. However, digital formats are subject to various risks and need continual maintenance to guarantee their long-term endurance.
Threats to a digital object’s preservation not only includes digital equivalents of degradation and decay, but due to the consistent and rapid evolution of digital formats, they are also threatened with obsolescence.
Digital preservation software tools can safeguard digital collections by preforming regular checks on each item’s health, accessibility, and usability. If a fault is identified, the tool will make sure an identical backup can be used as a replacement, securing the digital object’s ongoing preservation.
On the surface, digital preservation appears to be a complex subject suited to large organizations with dedicated resources. This is often compounded with lots of confusing information that may seem over-complicated to those unfamiliar with technical jargon.
However, when described in simple terms, digital preservation can be a realistic and achievable task for all collecting organizations. Our resource, What is Digital Preservation?, breaks down the subject of digital preservation into easily to digestible core concepts and terms.
All your digital content in one place
All Your Digital Content in One Place
Whether your collection holds images, audio, video, or even 3D files - Recollect is a single repository for all your digital records.
Digital collections often hold a range of content in various file formats. A portrait of an artist might be stored as a .tiff file, whereas a 3D scan of a sculpture they created will be stored as a .obj file, and a recorded interview will be stored as a .wav file. Each of these file formats have different requirements for how they are accessed, stored, and managed.
Scenarios like this can be problematic for organizations trying to store their digital collections. They might find they need to use multiple unrelated platforms to host content, which can result in a fragmented and disjointed collection. Disconnection between related items diminishes a collections value because it results in the loss of important contextual information.
A comprehensive collection management system (CMS) that can hold all of an organization’s content within one online platform (regardless of file format) is a good solution. Not only does a CMS provide you with an easily accessible location to manage all your data, but it can also hugely increase the collections value. It will enable you to create contextual connections between related items, revealing a narrative and a deeper understanding of the collection, ultimately facilitating better user experiences.
Digital content of all formats is being created at an increasing pace, exposing the need for a unified repository for digital assets, data records, and stories — one adapts and grows dynamically according to your business requirements.
Recollect is a comprehensive platform designed to host, manage, and share digital collections of all formats. In our case study, Emerging From The Primordial Technological Ooze, librarians and archivists at the University of Newcastle were faced with the challenge of making their digital collections (stored as various file formats) easily accessible and discoverable. They used Recollect to successfully build Living Histories, an online digital collections platform, that is tailored to their specific needs.
Tell the stories held in your collection
Tell the Stories Held in your Collection
Share your collections' stories as they're supposed to be told.
The success of a digital collection relies on the target audience being able to easily discover the stories and information that matters to them the most. Users of digital collections might be members of an organization, a local community, or niche researchers: all of which have different methods of discovery.
Filtered search functionality is a necessary feature for users that know exactly what they are trying to find — but what if a user simply wants to browse or explore your collection?
Collection showcases can help users find the most interesting stories within your collections by directing their attention towards specific sub-collections that support valuable engagement.
The Recollect platform (designed as a comprehensive collection management system) provides a variety of tools to help administrators create collection showcases, e.g., dedicated static pages, information hubs, timelines, and narrative items.
The State Library of South Australia (SLSA) implemented a collection showcase within their Digital Collections to emphasize the story of pioneer aviators, the Smith Brothers. SLSA created a dedicated static page that utilises many of Recollect’s discovery tools including a timeline, event items, object items, persona profiles, along with an information hub that connects all content relating to the Smith Brothers.
To read more, our resource "Showcasing Digital Collections" takes a closer look at the methods administrators can use to highlight specific topics and guarantee positive user experiences. If you'd like to have a member of the Recollect team reach out to you, fill out the Recollect Journey survey below, and we'll be in touch soon.
Recollect Makes it Easy
Discover how Recollect makes it easy.
Recollect's industry-leading Collection Management System ensures you have the tools you need to manage your digital collection and engage your community.
Explore our range of features below, and understand how the Recollect platform enhances your collection and supports your audience.
If you'd like to discuss whether our platform is right for you, fill out the form below to have a member of the Recollect team reach out.
