Features

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.

Features
01

Dashboard

What it does

One landing screen with today's tasks, pending approvals, open jobs and recent activity across every module.

Why museums need it

Small teams need to know what needs attention without opening five systems and asking three people.

02

Collections

What it does

The catalogue itself: every object, artwork, console, game, publication, multimedia item and archival record in one place.

Why museums need it

One catalogue means one answer to 'what do we hold', instead of three partial lists that disagree.

03

Object records

What it does

Images, metadata, condition reports, provenance, valuation and documentation history attached to a single record.

Why museums need it

The knowledge stops living in a curator's head and starts living with the object.

04

Categories & data models

What it does

Top-level categories, subcategories and per-medium field sets the museum defines and edits itself.

Why museums need it

No collection fits a fixed template - and no museum should pay a developer to add a field.

05

Locations & movement

What it does

Buildings, rooms and precise locations, with the movement history of every object between them.

Why museums need it

Finding the object is half the work of every exhibition, loan and audit.

06

Search & filtering

What it does

Cross-collection search across fields, categories, platforms, condition, materials, language and year.

Why museums need it

Research requests and exhibition planning both start with a question the database has to answer fast.

07

Digital archive

What it does

Images, scans, documents and media files stored against the objects they describe.

Why museums need it

Digitisation is only useful when the files are findable years later - and by someone else.

08

Reports

What it does

Collection reports by category, condition, location, acquisition and completeness, exportable for boards and funders.

Why museums need it

Museums are asked to prove their holdings and their care regularly, often at short notice.

09

Users, roles & permissions

What it does

Staff, volunteers and researchers with defined roles, permissions and a full activity log.

Why museums need it

Volunteers should be able to help catalogue without risk to the record - and every change should be traceable.

10

Operations & workflow

What it does

Tickets and till, staff rotas, maintenance jobs, school visits, camps and the events calendar.

Why museums need it

The museum's day is not just its collection, and running it in spreadsheets costs hours every week.

11

Shop & supplies inventory

What it does

Retail stock with suppliers, reorder points and sales per line, plus a separate store for consumables - packing, conservation and cleaning materials.

Why museums need it

Two inventories that are usually invisible until something runs out mid-exhibition or an audit asks where the money went.

12

Press & partner relations

What it does

Contacts and correspondence with press, other museums, sponsors and institutions, logged against the organisation rather than one person's inbox.

Why museums need it

Institutional relationships outlive the staff who built them, and loans and coverage both depend on knowing the history.

13

Analytics

What it does

Growth of the collection, cataloguing throughput, attendance and programme activity over time.

Why museums need it

Institutional decisions and funding applications both need trend data, not one-off counts.

14

Assisted cataloguing (in development)

What it does

Suggested metadata, duplicate detection and bulk field completion for large backlogs.

Why museums need it

Every museum has a backlog measured in years; the bottleneck is typing, not judgement.

Want to see it against your own collection?

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