Gloria Creed-Dikeogu

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Gloria Creed-Dikeogu

• The Past Perfected University archiving and
  small college libraries

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Past Perfect

• Software created by Pastime Software Company in
  Exton, PA
• Inexpensive software used by small museums and
  small libraries with archives and special
  collections

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Software Notes

• Past Perfect is a back-end software in which you
  enter your records and digitized photographs
• The front end of the system places your
  collections on the web and is called Past Perfect
  Virtual Exhibit
• Customers may purchase software online from the
  vendor
• The vendor offers training programs and software
  support to customers
• Customers can call software support if they have
  questions or problems that needs solving

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Software Notes

• The vendor website has a newsletter news
  releases about products, a customer list and a
  link to a customer discussion forum
• Customer can download user guides for different
  versions of the product from the website
• Software upgrades of 3.5 are available and can be
  uploaded from the vendor website along with the
  Virtual Exhibit Front End

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What can Past Perfect software help you to do?

• Software aids small libraries to accession
• Special Collections books
• Collections of objects or artifacts
• Archival Collections
• Photographs

• Small libraries can
• Accession collections
• Catalog Collections
• Describe collections in
• detail and include notes
• and provenance
• Digitize collections that are described

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Software pricing

• Recently upgraded from 3.0 to 3.5 which was free
• Libraries with very small budgets can afford this
  software
• Currently small museums and libraries can
  purchase software Version 4.0 for 795
• The virtual exhibit front-end costs 375
• Upgrades to the newest system 4.0 cost 310 if
  you already have an older version of the product
  installed

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Past Perfect Tabs

• Accessions Collections
• Research
• Memberships
• Utilities
• Setup

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Accessions Collections

• This tab organizes the libraries collections by
• Objects
• Photos
• Archives and
• Library
• Offers libraries the ability to make lists of
  items in temporary custody with other museums or
  libraries and checkout or in items for loan

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Research

• This tab includes various searches that can be
  done on collections in objects, photos, archives
  or the library such as by
• Keyword
• Lexicon
• People
• Search Terms

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Memberships

• We do not use this tab
• It would be a very useful tab for small museums
  that keep membership lists and charge for
  memberships so that they can easily manage their
  membership lists and membership funding and
  information as part of the system

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Utilities

• This tab allows libraries to do some of the
  following tasks
• Backup their records to a server
• Import or Export records
• Re-index records after an upgrade

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Setup

• This tab allows libraries to setup the following
  for use in the software
• Function Keys
• Security
• Barcodes

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Licenses and Servers

• The library currently has one license for
  software
• Our records have been setup so that they are
  backed up each time we work on the system to the
  universitys server
• If something happens to the laptop or there is an
  error or a problem with the software the
  software can be replaced on the computer and
  files can be pulled from the server

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