musdb is museum-digital's tool for indexing and creating inventories. Originally developed for recording objects to be published only, it has since developed into a full-featured inventory and museum management solution.
Central to the development of musdb are:
Musdb should be easy and intuitive to use. It should be fun to use. On the one hand, this means that the design should give a clear focus to the main subject of a given page. To reach this aim, options exist to toggle many features on or off. Optional features (like generating QR codes for object pages or a table of contents to directly jump to the wanted section of a page) are available in a toolbox on the left border of the window.
But easy and intuitive also means that power users can work efficiently in whatever way suits them best. Musdb offers a variety of aids for this. A selection of these are:
Musdb is based on PHP8 and MySQL. A number of PHP and JavaScript libraries are used, a list of which can be found in the handbook.
Centralized Controlled Vocabularies
All museums working with musdb use one set of controlled vocabularies for linked actors, places, times, and tags. The work for enriching such concepts with translations, links to the common norm data repositories etc. thus only needs to be done once - and everybody immediately profits from having accessible those entries that have already been entered for another museum beforehand.
Exports
All object data can be exported using a simple XML notation based on our own data structure ('md:xml') for full exports or in common exchange formats such as LIDO. An export to Excel files and autogenerated catalogues are available as well.
Edit whichever way is most suitable to you
musdb supports a multitude of ways to update object data. Users can toggle the object editing page to a fully customizable form, in which given fields or subsections of object data can be moved in place using drag and drop. For editing many objects at once, there are batch editing capabilities and a table-based editing mode available. And if you're still not satisfied, you can even write your own interface using the API.
Flexible search
Searching objects is done using a custom query language built on top of the Manticore search database and our taxonomies. If you want to search not only objects, but a given term in all of your museum's data, you can use musdb's universal search feature.
Automatic quality control
musdb aims to make it easy to enter high quality data. To this end, we have included many features for, among other things, enabling you to simply make tags more specific using our controlled vocabularies and a simple right click; PuQI, a tool for quantifying the quality of publishable object information entered; automatic improvement suggestions, that enable you to semi-automatically run obvious corrections and completions of your data using a Tinder-like interface.
musdb is build for multi-lingual use and has been translated to a number of languages. Of course, we are always looking forward to help in translating the musdb (just like all other tools at museum-digital) to new languages. A description of how our dedicated translation tool can be used for doing so is available on the blog (German).
How much does musdb cost?
musdb is free of charge and will stay so. Users with the required permissions can add as many additional users as necessary.
What are the system requirements for musdb?
musdb is fully web-based. Thus only an up-to-date browser is required to use musdb.
Is it possible to use musdb only for collection management without publishing?
Yes.
Can I import my existing collection data to musdb?
In principle, yes. Given that the data has been compiled in a structured way, we have thus far always found a way to import the data. Import scripts for common exchange formats such as LIDO and exports from other popular collection management systems exist out of the box (a list can be found in the handbook) and can be used in cooperation with our technical team or on one's own using musdb's WebDAV interface for import data.
Does musdb support two-factor authentication?
Yes. Users can enable two-factor authentication based on hardware tokens (e.g. Yubikeys or Nitrokeys), TOTP (which is e.g. used by Google Authenticator) or by mail.
Is there any limit to the number of images that can be uploaded per object?
No. You may upload as many images (or other media types such as video, audio, PDFs, or 3D representations) as necessary.
Can musdb be used for managing our museum library?
Yes.