Significance and Storytelling, with ArchivEra

The Military Women’s Memorial selected ArchivEra to move to an industry standard archival CMS with extensible and stable technology, and to offer public access to their collection.

The Memorial houses a unique collection that brings to life the firsthand experiences of America’s servicewomen. It is the first major national memorial to honor all servicewomen, past and present, and is home to over 8,000 donations from thousands of servicewomen, veterans, and their families and friends representing all eras and services, as well as uniformed civilian women working with organizations supporting the military such as the American Red Cross, USO, YMCA and Salvation Army.

Director of Collections and Curator, Britta Granrud, sat down with us to discuss their implementation of ArchivEra, which first came about due to the organizational switch from a Mac environment to a PC environment, making their customized database obsolete. When they took a close look at ArchivEra, they soon realized how much powerful functionality the leading archival CMS would deliver.

The Memorial’s collection is not purely archival, so ArchivEra’s expanded capabilities (including multimedia) were a good match for the museum objects and artifacts that make up a significant portion of their holdings—setting ArchivEra apart from the other systems they evaluated.  “The functionality to support all our goals existed in ArchivEra, and the high level of client support, along with vendor hosting, plus the manageable price point made it the right choice for the Memorial.”

Ms. Granrud spoke about the benefits of working with Lucidea’s Client Services staff, who have relevant sector knowledge that made the implementation go especially smoothly. “Coming from a background of shared understanding always adds value. When you work with Lucidea’s sector specialists, they understand things like gift agreements; they understand the donor agreement process. They understand the challenges of having worked to maintain intellectual control over several decades and how that can be improved.”

We invite you to read their full success story here.