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Art & Auction
May 2003 Digital Tool for the Organized Collector
by Carol Kino For years, collectors in need of cataloguing their art holdings were caught between two extremes. At one end are professional museum and gallery software programs like GalleryPro, Art Base or Museum Systems, but these generally cost thousands of dollars and require pricey tech support. At the other end are cheaper, mass-market collectibles programs that can't always be adapted to different fields.
To fill this gap Collectify, developer of collection-cataloguing software, created the program MyStuff, which offers museum-level quality at a Beanie Baby price of $99.95, free upgrades and tech support. What sets MyStuff apart, says Collectify founder Franklin Silverstone, is that it is geared toward collectors, not galleries or museums, and is easily adaptable for many collecting areas. "People who collect one thing are likely to collect another", says Silverstone, an art consultant in New York and Montreal and a onetime partner at Phillips Auctioneers.
Released in October 2001, MyStuff comes with preset modules for 26 types of collections, which can also be customized to accommodate any specialty. The program has e-mail and fax interfaces, as well as features that allow the user to store price and condition information for comparable objects, and to generate reports and illustrated catalogue entries that can be printed or e-mailed. Alerts can be triggered when a purchase exceeds the insurance coverage or when a consignment should be picked up.
Although MyStuff is currently only available for Windows, plans are in the works for Macintosh and Linux versions. Silverstone won't release sales figures, but says he hopes to sell "another 6,000 this year". www.artandauction.com
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