Our work with VERNON software

At the establishment of our library we acquired Vernon museum cataloguing software.

A start was made on using this in 2001, but it largely lapsed until a voluntary worker
devoted a day per week to making entries beginning early 2003.

This worker was overseas in early 2005 and on his return the entries were 18 months behind
the accessions, and the enormous Wills collection was received. The task of entering items
was clearly impossible, and also we were getting little benefit from the stored material.

We therefore temporarily abandoned the idea of entering everything on computer. We
sought a simpler program that would be ‘backwards compatible’ with our Vernon software,
but have not yet found anything suitable.

Also, we have problems in determining which items have sufficient ‘significance’ to warrant
the type of cataloguing that Vernon and similar systems require. Hence the need for a
professional significance assessment.

The following are available to view:

1.      A HTML printout of our Vernon entries (a huge file)

2.      An Excel copy of the entries, smaller but can be mined for some useful data

3.       A .pdf

 file of the printout, still a very big file.