Introduction
 
  Go here to begin using the public site, or here to go to the subscriber entrance.

This web site offers an online "Collection Management System" for art collectors, artists and small galleries and museums. All the data pertinent to your collection, including multimedia resources, can be stored within the fineartfacts relational database. All access is via a web browser over the internet, so we take on the responsibility for backing up your data and managing the database from our server site in the UK. Our experience suggests you should use a broadband connection to get the most from fineartfacts.

If you want to make use of the service, then you must become a "Subscriber" by submitting a brief resume and paying a small annual subscription fee. Subscriptions start from £250 per year for the basic level of service, and rise to £600 per year for the comprehensive level of service. Once your subscription has been authorized, you will be issued with logon information that includes a Username, a Password, and a Workgroup that give you access to a new and private area of the fineartfacts database and online tools. You will then be billed annually.

To use the service, you just connect up to the web, go to www.fineartfacts.com and log on to the "Member's Area". Once logged on, you will be presented with the "Switchboard" page. This page is your "home base" and provides the starting point for all the data entry, retrieval, browsing, searching and other tools and facilities.

Your area of the database will be pretty much empty when you log on for the first time. A few items of information will have been set up for you by the fineartfacts database administrator, but you will be presented with a clean sheet with which to start. It goes without saying that most people will already have such information collected in digital format. If you are in this situation and you want to migrate your existing digital information to fineartfacts, then we will be happy work with you to upload your data en-mass to the fineartfacts web site.

If you wish to take advantage of the web publishing capabilities of fineartfacts without abandoning your existing Collection Management System, then we can arrange to keep your fineartfacts data synchronised with your existing Collection Management System and we can arrange for this to be done automatically too.

If you are starting from scratch, then typically you will start by entering data about some of the main protagonists associated with you art collection - the artists, the copyright holders and the owners. Once you have this information entered, then you can start inputting data about the works of art in your collection via web-based forms. As you select the artists, the copyright holders, the owners etc of each work, the fineartfacts database will begin to build the indices and relationships allowing you to search for say, all works produced by artist X in year Y at location Z. As well as this basic information, fineartfacts offers you the opportunity to record the provenance of a work of art such as your photographic or video record of the work, where it was exhibited, the documentation associated with a work, what literature it has been quoted in, etc. Not only is the data about the photographs, letters, documents etc recorded by you on the database, but you have the facility to upload the images of scanned documents, photographs, video, sound files etc via the basic browser interface.

Imagine that you have been a subscriber for a while and a fair part of your collection is now stored on FineArtFacts. You may be interested to give the public access to a certain part of your collection. This you can do by designating the access code for each work. If you choose to designate a database record as "Public" then it becomes available on the Public side of the fineartfacts website and is available to the general public. Since all the information is recorded in a database, and since all the web-pages are generated in realtime, this means that any changes you make take effect immediately on the public site.

If you are interested in a more tailor-made solution, then we can provide a complete "white-site" solution for you.

Please e-mail us at: admin@fineartfacts.com

Go here to begin using the public site, or here to go to the subscriber entrance.