Madrona | The Open Source Museum Collection Management System

Alas, despite the best efforts of our team, we are delaying the launch of Madrona.  After extensive beta testing with over 50 museum professionals (thank you!), we found the program needs a little more work and we are postponing the launch of Madrona Community until 2010.  The underlying structure is solid, but the interface still needs work to make it absolutely intuitive to users.  We know that many in the museum world will have no trouble using Madrona but we also need to make sure the product works for smaller museums that don’t have the resources for a step learning curve.

We apologize for the delay - we know some of you out there are very keen to start using Madrona, but we want to make sure that it is as perfect as we can before we launch it.

Watch this site for more information on launch dates in 2010.  As always,  if you have questions about Madrona, please contact us at zeroone@zeroonedesign.com.

The t-shirts have arrived - so added incentive to become one of our beta testers! Beta test the program and we’ll give you a beautiful - no, stunning Madrona t-shirt and you will be the belle of the collections ball. Yes, we are ridiculously happy that the t-shirts have arrived - because they were the easiest of the tasks we have before us. Thanks to Caroline Davies Posynick for the slogan idea.

We are on our third batch of beta testers this week and the comments on Madrona have been good.  Not always glowing - but this is why we beta test.

We started this project wanting to create a new type of collection management system - one that would be ‘built’ by museum professionals, one that would be affordable to small museums, one that would reduce the work flow for people using it and one that would integrate with the new batch of great Web 2.0 tools that are available on the web.  It’s a tough order but we are almost there.

Our beta testing began with a small group of museum contacts that we had worked with in the past.  This group saw the very rough beginnings of Madrona - very rough.  We then opened it up to a remote test group - museum people that were recommended to us or those not geographically close to us that we had worked with previously.  This group saw a more polished - but definitely not finished version of Madrona.  We made a few more changes - specifically areas that this group had highlighted as issues - and opened it up to our third beta group.  This group is again museum people hand picked by us - and again a very small group.  In August we open up a much more polished version of Madrona to a much much larger group of museum people.  And that’s when it will get really interesting!

Some of the comments we have received so far:

“I am excited about what it will do to help us organize our records.”

“Wow. This could be big stuff, and I am well-pleased to be one of the very first beta testers.”

” I thought the overall look and feel was terrific”

Interested in being a beta tester?  Let us know at zeroone@zeroonedesign.com.