Case Study: M+ achieves robust archival management and integrated collections workflows with Gallery Systems' TMS

M+ - Customer Case Study

M+, the new museum in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, needed to manage large, hierarchical archival collections alongside conventional museum objects and to clean three years of legacy archive data. Working with Gallery Systems and using The Museum System (TMS), M+ required a sustainable, bilingual (English/Chinese) cataloguing approach that could represent fonds-level hierarchies and support cross-department workflows.

Gallery Systems configured TMS for M+—creating separate Archive Accessions and Archives departments, mapping ISAD(G) fields into TMS with custom text entries, enabling parent–child and “see also” relationships, and using the TMS Importer to speed data entry. The outcome is a robust, museum-wide CMS: legacy archives were cleaned over about a year to 18 months, finding aids now contain tens of thousands of hierarchically linked records, data entry is faster with fewer errors, and M+ can manage acquisitions, conservation, exhibitions, and bilingual public displays through Gallery Systems’ TMS.

M+

Kevin Forkan

Head, Archives and Library