Case Study: Indian Arts Research Center achieves efficient, transparent management of Southwestern cultural collections with Gallery Systems' TMS

Large-Scale Collection, Small-Scale Team Effectively Maintaining Community-based Cultural Collections

The Indian Arts Research Center (IARC), a division of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, manages a large ethnological and archaeological collection — more than 12,000 Southwestern Native American ceramics, textiles and works on paper and over 345,000 archaeological objects — while operating with just six primary staff plus interns and volunteers. Faced with the need for a sophisticated but easy-to-use collections management system that supported transparency, culturally appropriate access, and a transient team, IARC implemented The Museum System (TMS) from Gallery Systems.

Gallery Systems delivered a TMS implementation that leveraged the Media, Events, Bibliography, Rights & Reproductions and customizable fields to centralize media and documentation, track events and object use, and record loans and exhibitions back to 1979. The solution reduced staff training/onboarding time, improved media and document management, enhanced workflow transparency and collaboration, and made the collection more accessible to artists, scholars and the public — enabling IARC’s small team to add, track and report on collection data more thoroughly and efficiently.