Everything a museum needs to hold, describe and run its collection.
museumOS covers the full arc of collections work - cataloguing, documentation, location tracking, research and reporting - and keeps going into the operational work that surrounds it.
Dashboard
One landing screen with today's tasks, pending approvals, open jobs and recent activity across every module.
Small teams need to know what needs attention without opening five systems and asking three people.
Collections
The catalogue itself: every object, artwork, console, game, publication, multimedia item and archival record in one place.
One catalogue means one answer to 'what do we hold', instead of three partial lists that disagree.
Object records
Images, metadata, condition reports, provenance, valuation and documentation history attached to a single record.
The knowledge stops living in a curator's head and starts living with the object.
Categories & data models
Top-level categories, subcategories and per-medium field sets the museum defines and edits itself.
No collection fits a fixed template - and no museum should pay a developer to add a field.
Locations & movement
Buildings, rooms and precise locations, with the movement history of every object between them.
Finding the object is half the work of every exhibition, loan and audit.
Search & filtering
Cross-collection search across fields, categories, platforms, condition, materials, language and year.
Research requests and exhibition planning both start with a question the database has to answer fast.
Digital archive
Images, scans, documents and media files stored against the objects they describe.
Digitisation is only useful when the files are findable years later - and by someone else.
Reports
Collection reports by category, condition, location, acquisition and completeness, exportable for boards and funders.
Museums are asked to prove their holdings and their care regularly, often at short notice.
Users, roles & permissions
Staff, volunteers and researchers with defined roles, permissions and a full activity log.
Volunteers should be able to help catalogue without risk to the record - and every change should be traceable.
Operations & workflow
Tickets and till, staff rotas, maintenance jobs, school visits, camps and the events calendar.
The museum's day is not just its collection, and running it in spreadsheets costs hours every week.
Shop & supplies inventory
Retail stock with suppliers, reorder points and sales per line, plus a separate store for consumables - packing, conservation and cleaning materials.
Two inventories that are usually invisible until something runs out mid-exhibition or an audit asks where the money went.
Press & partner relations
Contacts and correspondence with press, other museums, sponsors and institutions, logged against the organisation rather than one person's inbox.
Institutional relationships outlive the staff who built them, and loans and coverage both depend on knowing the history.
Analytics
Growth of the collection, cataloguing throughput, attendance and programme activity over time.
Institutional decisions and funding applications both need trend data, not one-off counts.
Assisted cataloguing (in development)
Suggested metadata, duplicate detection and bulk field completion for large backlogs.
Every museum has a backlog measured in years; the bottleneck is typing, not judgement.