Case Study: The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology achieves standardized cataloguing and 50% faster record entry with Gallery Systems

Standardizing Cataloguing for a Natural History Collection

The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, Canada’s museum dedicated to palaeontology with over 150,000 specimens and hundreds of researchers and thousands of visitors each year, struggled with a legacy, spreadsheet-style cataloguing system that relied on free-text fields and manual taxonomic hierarchy entry. These practices led to inconsistent terminology, slow and error-prone data entry, and difficulty locating and tracking specimens. To address this, the Museum adopted The Museum System (TMS) and eMuseum from Gallery Systems.

Gallery Systems helped the Museum standardize TMS by creating dropdowns for taxonomic hierarchies and storage locations, configuring hierarchy authority controls and the Control Insert thesaurus, and integrating eMuseum for public publishing. The changes cut new-record input time by about 50%, reduced data-entry errors, enabled precise tracking across 1,000+ specimen cabinets and roughly 5,000 items on loan, and improved researcher access and response times; eMuseum will publish validated records online to further streamline queries.

Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology

Graeme Housego

Collections Assistant