Make your collection more visible and accessible than ever before
Flexible and purpose-built for museums and galleries, Argus enhances curation and opens your museum’s doors to the world.
Enhanced Curation and Enriched Experiences
Argus is a flexible Web-based collections management system platform for museums and galleries. Argus is built to enhance curation, and to significantly expand outreach and access via the Web, enriching the experience for both in-person and virtual visitors.
Lucidea is a proud Spectrum Partner, helping support the British international reference standard that establishes management procedures for cultural heritage collections. Spectrum is Collection Trust’s seal of quality and represents a commitment to global best practice that we embrace unreservedly. Learn more.
The Argus Difference
Unlike traditional collections management platforms, fully Web-based Argus enables you to easily offer public portal access to objects and exhibits and to provide more in-depth documentation about each artifact – delivering content in context. You can also leverage efficient purpose-built workflows with minimal training required, and can rest secure in the knowledge that Argus is built on sustainable, cutting edge technology that will remain relevant as your collection and requirements grow.
Museums and galleries stay accessible, visible and relevant with Argus
The combined collection management and portal elements of the system result in greater operational efficiency and strong partnerships between Collections, IT, faculty and other departments. Ease of use and minimal training time leads to rewarding volunteer opportunities and increased accessibility and productivity for staff. Finally, Argus empowers you to offer an educational, inspiring and entertaining experience for visitors the world over.
Sophisticated Web Presence
Significantly expand outreach and access through a public Web and mobile portal linked directly to your entire collection (beyond the 1-4% that’s on exhibit). Reach visitors near and far, and highlight specific exhibits and objects, or enable browsing of your entire collection through powerful search options including Google.
Enriched User Experience
Provide more documentation in more depth, for both individual objects and collections—with relevant multimedia and links to related artifacts.
Full integration; minimal training
Integrates back end administration with the public portal for real time updates, offers an API to push and pull data within your organization as needed, and is designed for easy data entry with intuitive workflows—reducing training for new staff, interns and volunteers.
Web access that reaches virtual audiences
Open your doors to the whole world with a public access portal that offers powerful search and makes your collection discoverable via Google. Offer sophisticated image galleries and links to related objects, highlight special exhibits and share curated collections – use the Web to show, tell, engage and inspire.
Mobile access for museum visitors and staff
Staff can work anytime, anywhere using a mobile device; they can search for and record data wherever they are, check the condition of objects on site and do inventories from within warehouses and galleries. Visitors, in-person and virtual, can explore using mobile devices (accessing the full portal from a tablet) and you can inspire visits with mobile read-only sessions specific to a particular exhibit or event.
Efficient, streamlined workflows
With dynamic updating, information entered once behind the scenes is automatically refreshed in the public portal, with no need for exporting or connectors. Intuitive, easy to use navigation minimizes training requirement for your staff, interns and volunteers, giving them more time with the collection.
Request management
Lucidea’s feature-rich Request Management Solution offers end-to-end capabilities that take museum research workflow seamlessly from request or project capture, to request handler assignment and resource allocation, to collaboration, to (multimedia) documentation, to communication with the requester—and finally to automatic creation of a database for reuse and reporting—all within a single venue.
Built with LucideaCore
LucideaCore is the culmination of 20 years’ worldwide experience serving thousands of organizations in multiple industries, combined with intensive R&D. LucideaCore applications help information professionals create and deliver valuable, user friendly information resources driven by a powerful engine that improves curation, discoverability, and access.
Integrate with your current system and resources
Argus helps you meet the needs of staff and end users as the organization grows and/or changes – without depending heavily on IT. Customize the user experience, add fields for new content, and modify workflows with the easy configuration settings to suit your needs – now and in the future.
Use Cases
Curation: Share Important Additional Resources
There is always a wealth of information related to any single artifact in a museum or gallery collection. Curators know that providing supporting materials to researchers, authors, students and faculty is critical to expanding knowledge – and to demonstrating added value through easy access to these additional resources. With Argus’ enhanced curation options, a University Art Museum shares important supporting information relating to single objects, and structures collections of related artifacts to enrich the museum visitor’s experience, whether in person or virtual.
Support System: Operational Efficiency
A museum of Western history selected Argus because it presents minimal training requirements, integrates seamlessly with existing IT projects and architecture (including gallery kiosks), and offers ease of use for staff, interns and volunteers. Argus enables supportive partnership between curation staff and the IT department, with a system flexible enough for IT to easily adapt as needed while also reducing their training burden. The combined elements of the system result in operational efficiency and great partnership between departments.
Stay Local while going Global
A (previously) hidden gem of a regional museum uses Argus to fulfill their goal of focusing on technology based outreach through a Web portal, enabling research and general perusal of their collection by visitors around the world, expanding their reputation and even inspiring in-person visits. Historically a hands-on family friendly place focused on educating and entertaining the local community, their new strategy includes showcasing their collection to virtual visitors further afield—offering a great Web-based “global community” resource that is modern and sustainable well into the future.
Essentia Program
Enterprise-class solutions “right-sized” for your small-but-mighty organization
Lucidea supports clients with enterprise class museum collections management software, whether you’re large, small, or somewhere-in-between.
Think the power, flexibility and impact of our solutions are beyond your reach? If you’re small-but-mighty, we’ve got you covered with our Essentia program, designed to deliver outstanding value to smaller clients. Everything you need, at a price you can afford.
Training and support…unparalleled and included
We offer training throughout the life of your partnership with us. Our training sessions help you maximize the value of your investment in our solutions. Our instructors and materials show you how to use Argus and give you a broad understanding of the system. This foundation enables you to make decisions that ensure Argus is optimized to fit your organization’s needs.
Our team of helpful technical experts is available around the clock to solve your technical problems and provide exceptional customer service, 24/7/365.
