We have moved our archives and collections records on to Proficio Management. This has brought a lot of information on artifacts and archival material into one place. It is really easy to attach information to an item, search an item, make reports, and use on different computers.

How thorough it is, the customer support, the manual, accessible by multiple staff or volunteers at the same time with different permissions.

It takes a while to learn all of the details and functions available, and I'm sure we'll be constantly learning, but that is a bonus as well. Paired with lots of tech support and the easily accessibly manual this learning curve is manageable.

As a museum that is starting to grow and expand its programs, collections scope, and outreach, all while trying to come to terms with a very diverse collection, Proficio Elements has been a great tool for us to have at our disposal and has let us be far more flexible in our day-to-day tasks than before. We greatly appreciate being able to go to a shelf or drawer with our computer and work on tasks with ease and find that we can be more productive with this system.

Having everything in the cloud has allowed us to gain easier access to our database when not within the walls of the museum or tethered to the network via a hardwired line. We are still learning some of the features, but the fact that everything works together means the information is easier to access in one place without coming in and out of screen options. We added the website side of things too and that has helped us spread the word about our collection and develop a new audience than we could have had before.

This is not Re:discovery's fault, but the network connection can sometimes be slow, but usually when there are heavy times of use like mid-semester or near finals week. The initial layout was a bit hard to figure out coming from a very different database, but even that was easy to get used to after a while.

Customer service was good. Enjoyed the online workshops to learn about new ways to do things. For us, it ultimately came down to inability to offer a public portal in order to share our collection, the restricted number of users (you can add more for additional costs), and the system was ultimately much larger and complicated than we needed.

This system was in place before I started managing this collection. Although we did end up going to a new system, for the past 10 + years, the ReDiscovery software (and later, cloud-based system) was instrumental in managing our collection in the early years.

Not very user friendly. Clunky. Required going through a lot of processes to share information, and to retreive images and documents.

I've worked with several other collections softwares in the past. When I was brought on in my current role, my immediate goal was to get a collections management software. I wanted something easy to use, so that I could teach it to others, and something that would allow for a wide array of items. My supervisor and I sat through several demos, and did a test-drive on a few other options. We did not have a large budget, but did have a large need. Ultimately, we chose to go with Re:Discovery Proficio for several reasons- the price was great (the software offered a wider selection than others in its price category), and we were assured that should we need something, we could get help pretty quickly. Two years later, and I can safely say that this was one of my better decisions. Anytime I need anything, a rep is quick to answer. There are monthly trainings/refreshers, and videos of past sessions are available online. I love that I can fully catalog an item in a short period of time, and I'm able to use the keyboard almost entirely (rather than having to repeatedly click on different windows- small, but it makes it easier to use for me, making my workflow more efficient). I've had to reach out to ask about a particular category for an item, and it was added, allowing us to catalog different types of items in the archives. The flexibility is great!

Ease of use, easy to learn, and the customer service is so great.

The two logins needed- one for the software itself, and the second, individual login (although I completely understand the security concern behind that).