A bit of editing, but basically the two tweets I sent this morning about a discouraging meeting in Rome…
Participating to meeting on City of Rome museum IT system, today. Over 220k records uploaded. Alas, it’s a closed, proprietary software, and it is still limited to Intranet (though the SIMART programme was started almost a decade ago…)
Detailed description of SIMART - Rome’s municipal museum network system - and its new features at IT meeting, today. It’s like nicely describing in all its details a leave, not taking notice of the rotten stem… Weren’t FOSS tools at hand, from start?
— Alessandro Califano (@a_califano) January 22, 2013
After a multi-year long gestation, the City of Rome’s new museum information system - called SIMURT (Simurgh would have been nicer… especially if you’ve read Borges) - was finally presented this morning with bells and whistles on Capitol Hill.
I’ll get more details, soon, but from all I know up to now one can only wonder if it’s been born dead, or if it will be just another havoc causing mule…
Or did someone already hear of temporary joint ventures of non-specialised companies, providing engineering, infrastructures and software for knitting together a large network of museums? Who’s gonna provide maintenance and assistance, or major adjustments, once the joint venture won’t be such any longer?
