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----------------------------Original message---------------------------- [This message has been posted to ARLIS-L and MUSEUM-L. Please excuse any duplication.] Dear Friends: The Castellani Art Museum is planning a resource room for use by the Niagara University community, area teachers, researchers, and visitors to the museum. The room will offer access to: the Castellani's slide collection; a text- and image-base of the museum's inventory; works on paper and objects from the collection; a text- and image-base of folk arts materials, including slides, photographs, objects, interviews on tape and in transcript, and videotapes; reference books relating to the collections; and electronic resources, including the Underground Railroad CD-ROM produced in-house, and the Internet. In addition, the room will provide space for small, ad hoc exhibitions in support of Niagara University courses. I hope that you can give me some input on two questions. 1) Are you familiar with, or have you planned a similar resource room? If so, would you be willing to provide details on your project, and any references in the literature you found useful? 2) We have looked at the requirements for the reference/folk arts and registrar's databases, and have selected two systems for further investigation: Inmagic DB/Textworks, and EmbARK. There has already been some discussion on this ARLIS-L about Inmagic; however, I do not recall having read anything about EmbARK. Does anyone have any experience with this system? How does it work for you? The information available from Digital Arts & Sciences' WWW-site (http://www.digital-collections.com/) makes EmbARK sound like the greatest thing since sliced bread, but we would appreciate input from people who have worked with it "in the trenches," so to speak. Please reply off-list. If anyone else is interested in this topic, I'll be happy to share the results of my query. Thank you for your time! Amy C. Grasmick intern, Castellani Art Museum [log in to unmask]