Sometimes the unthinkable happens: Unusual wind patterns sweep up an errant spark, setting ablaze the homes, businesses, and museums in your neighborhood. A winter storm freezes all activity in the city, and as energy demands tick upward, the grid powering your network fails. While attempting to update publication information, an intern accidentally grants system access to an outsider, exposing valuation and security details.
In these scenarios, the last thing you want to worry about is your collection data.
A collection’s value is not defined solely by the objects amassed, but also by the records that document their history. Provenance information, condition reports, loan agreements, and insurance documentation all live within collection management systems, forming the backbone of responsible stewardship. When collections are under threat–whether through hardware failure, environmental disaster, or human error–access to current and accurate documentation can be the difference between a speedy recovery and the painstaking task of rebuilding your collection.
In an era when collections are increasingly managed digitally, safeguarding this information is as essential as protecting the objects themselves. Digital stewardship through Collector Systems is where provenance meets protection. Our collection management system not only makes it easy to add, manage, and share collection information, but users can also do so safely—even in the wake of a disaster.
One of the most often overlooked areas of data security in collections management is access. Many collection systems have an administrator managing the framework and generalized users who can view, share, and edit nearly everything in the database. Curators may have access to auditing information, insurance consultants might have visibility into donor information, a curious intern might stumble upon appraisal values and vault security information, or a registrar might think nothing of sharing their login information with a new hire. All of these common situations jeopardize collection security.
To mitigate these risks, Collector Systems allows for granular permissions. Admin users can set and manage user types, defining visibility and editing capabilities for users. Some staff members can be granted the ability to view, manage, and edit most records, while external users can be given secure access to limited collection information. Granular permissions prevent unauthorized access to information, ensuring everyone can complete their tasks efficiently without risking sensitive information.
In the event of someone attempting to access your collection information unauthorized, our strong security frameworks lock the digital vault doors. Our systems are SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, meaning independent professionals have evaluated our security practices through rigorous testing and found them to meet or exceed industry standards effectively over time. Certificates like these prevent man-in-the-middle attacks–cyber attacks spying on data as it is transferred between parties. As a whole, these security frameworks ensure all data is encrypted and secure through every step of collection management.
Collector Systems also employs mandatory two-factor authentication, ensuring no one can log into the system without alerting the associated user. Upon logging in, all users are prompted to retrieve and enter a unique authentication code. Multi-factor authentication, or MFA, strengthens access control for museum staff, ensuring passwords aren’t shared, and access can’t be gained by simply guessing a user’s password. Built-in open authorization, or OAuth, allows users to securely access our apps using temporary, restricted access tokens, like FaceID. Features like these balance ease of use with strong security practices, streamlining access while always ensuring data security.
Security auditing has also never been easier than with Collector Systems. You can easily track user behaviors, seeing what information a particular user has accessed and edited. Our system keeps detailed and searchable data histories and action logs, making it easy to manage and identify errors and suspicious behavior. If an object goes missing, you can easily track who has historically accessed the item’s location, history, and valuation information, to assess who might have information about its whereabouts.
To add an additional layer of security and redundancy, Collector Systems is entirely cloud-based. For decades, traditional collection management systems have been locally stored on private servers located on the same premises as the collection. While this data management method keeps things secure through containment, it also comes with risks–server data could become corrupted and irretrievable, the server itself could be destroyed in a natural disaster, or a single employee could wipe out years of data with an errant keystroke. Our cloud-based system offers redundancy that prevents these types of events from becoming even larger problems.
Collector Systems was among the first cloud-based CMS. Our user data is backed up every 15 minutes on servers in multiple locations. In the event a natural disaster destroys your building or data storage, you can still access your collection information, and in the case of data corruption or misentry, you can revert your entire database to a past state. We store 35 days’ worth of encrypted 15-minute backups and 10 weeks of weekly backups on our servers. This means that at any moment, you can revert your system to a past state up to 75 days ago. As an added redundancy, all Collector Systems information is stored in multiple geographic locations, so if a server in Virginia goes offline, another in Arizona will remain online, so you can always securely access your information.
In today’s digital landscape, protecting a collection is about way more than locking doors and controlling access to physical objects. True stewardship extends to the information surrounding each object in your collection–from its purchase and latest appraisal, to historic location and publication information. With robust features like granular permissions, multi-factor authentication, continuous backups, and data encryption, Collector Systems ensures that every detail of your collection is safeguarded against threats–both human and environmental. By combining ease of use with rigorous protection, our system gives collectors and institutions peace of mind, allowing you to focus on what truly matters: preserving your collection for the future.
