Newry and Mourne Museum

Newry and Mourne Museum in Northern Ireland, is a long-standing Modes User with a collections management team of three. Shane McGivern, the museum’s collections research assistant, tells us how Modes Complete has helped support the museum’s ongoing work.

How has Modes helped you?

Modes Complete has been extremely useful for both staff and Museum visitors. For staff it has been a fantastic aid for guiding exhibitions. The Museum decides their exhibitions years in advance and having an easily searchable database in Modes enables us to very quickly see what in the Collection will be relevant. As the Museum runs two new temporary exhibitions a year, knowing what is in the Collection is of great importance. One year for example, one temporary exhibition looked at the local impacts of WW1, and the other looked at landownership in south-west Down.

In terms of visitors, as Modes allows the digitisation of collections, this has been a useful tool for opening access to documents without the visitor having to physically handle the original. This has two advantages, firstly it is good for the conservation of the original, and secondly it allows the user to look at details in a document much closer by zooming in. The guest user access for the public ensures that no data can be edited and also no private data such as donor name and address can be accessed.

As an Accredited Museum, what work is involved in the process?

The Museum has been Accredited since 2007. An important part of the Accreditation application is the conservation plan. This involves going through the entire Collection and assessing the condition of each item and also if it was a priority to be conserved. Modes was useful in this instance as a condition check is part of the cataloguing process. It simply makes the process easier.

Do you have any ‘top tips’ for getting the most out of Modes Complete?

When an item is donated to the Museum Collection, object entry details can be entered into Modes to create an object entry form, which looks exactly like those from the Collections Trust. This is useful as the data entered is typed and is therefore clearer for future users of the document. Added to this, the data from the object entry form can be used to generate a basic object record which makes the cataloguing much more efficient.

The Modes team have been absolutely fantastic with support. They are always available to answer any questions and work through any issues. Every time we have needed advice on the Modes system, the team always deliver.