Carlotta – a database system for museum collections

Carlotta is an information system being developed for museums and their museum collections. The system is currently owned by The Swedish National Museums of World Culture which consists of The Museum of Ethnography, The Museum of World Culture, The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities and the Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities. Other museums that use Carlotta are The Gothenburg City Museum, Kulturen in Lund, Malmö Museums, Helsingborg Museums, Lake Vänern Museum in Lidköping, Norrbotten Museum, Ájtte and The Museum of Rörstrands.

The basic idea of Carlotta is to provide a flexible system that can be used and adapted to all kinds of museum collections. A starting point has been CIDOC international way of naming fields, which is adapted to Swedish conditions as SWETERM in collaboration with CIDOC.

The development of Carlotta is governed by Carlottagruppen consisting of representatives from all the museums that use the system and system developers. It is a flexible system with many options for users.

Structure
When you store information in Carlotta do you do this in different registers. Each museum decide if you want to work with one or more registers. For example, one can use registers for collections, objects, photographs, persons or exhibitions. It is then possible to relate the different entities; persons may be linked to collections or objects acting as donors, users, depicted, manufacturers and so on.

Technology
The current version of Carlotta, Version 3, consists of three parts, client module, server module and database. Both client and server module and are java based. The server module is implemented as a Java EE application and runs in an application server from JBoss. The client module is a Java-application adapted to JavaWebStart.

Museums that use Carlotta

Version 3
    Norrbotten Museum (Luleå)
    Kulturen in Lund   Link to the database
    The National Museums of World Culture
        The Museum of Ethnography (Stockholm)   Link to the database
        The Museum of World Culture (Gothenburg)   Link to the database
        The Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities (Stockholm)   Link to the database
        The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Stockholm)   Link to the database
    Lake Vänern Museum (Lidköping)
    Göteborg City Museum
    Museum of Medical History (Lund)
    Ájtte fjäll- och samemuseum (Jokkmokk)
    Malmö City Museums

Version 2
    Helsingborg Museums   Link to the database
    Rörstrands museum (Lidköping)