O V ER V I EW

 Highly configurable
ARGUS.net IS THREE SOLUTIONS
software
accommodates a wide
range of collections
IN ONE
 Three solutions cover S o f t w a r e S ui t e o f f e r s ne w P o r t a l , C o l l e c t i o ns
Portals, Collections Ma na g e m e nt a nd A p p o p t i o n s f o r t o d a y ’ s m us e u m s
Management and Apps
for mobile devices
ARGUS.net OVERVIEW
 Powerful Lexicon
provides online ARGUS.net is a powerful Web-based collections management, portal and mobile app
thesaural control
solution designed to meet the needs of today’s museums as well as museums of the future.
It helps museums:

 Increase museum traffic using audience-specific portals and interactive exhibits

that are accessible over the Internet

 Inspire their visitors with multimedia presentations and access to collections using
mobile apps on smart phones and tablets

 Ignite new opportunities ranging from E-commerce to Membership metrics

Based on Questor’s robust ARGUS collections management solution, ARGUS.net is “one
system” that features seamless integration between three key areas. It includes not only
the features that today’s museums require for managing valuable museum collections but
also includes both a built-in Portal—a “web site in a box”—that lets you deliver information
C O N T EN TS about the collection activities over the Web easily and efficiently as well as a built-in App
 ARGUS.net Builder that lets you quickly deploy exhibit applications for mobile devices such as the iPad
Overview and iPhone.
 Collections
management ARGUS.net is highly configurable software, designed to accommodate a diverse range of
 Information collections—including archaeology, ethnology, fine and folk art, history, natural science and
Manager Portal slide collections. It has built-in features that allow museum professionals to re-configure
 App Builder for ARGUS.net as the museum’s needs change and as new requirements appear.
mobile devices
 State-Of-The-Art
Technology
 Option For 24/7
Hosting Service
 Data Driven
Strategy
 Integrated Web ARGUS.net
Strategy offers three
solutions in one:
Portals,
Collections
Management
and Exhibit
Apps for Mobile
devices
 COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT
Both museum professionals and museum visitors will find that searching the ARGUS.net
collection catalog is easy, powerful and efficient. ARGUS.net’s web catalog includes
sophisticated search features that provide for precise retrieval. Since the catalog is
updated dynamically, users can always find the most current information about the objects
that interest them. In addition museums can choose between integrating the built-in web
catalog into their existing Web site, or using the web catalog within ARGUS.net’s built-in
portal—the “one system” approach to delivering information about objects within the
complete context of the museum’s activities.

ARGUS.net includes a powerful hierarchical Lexicon that provides thesaural control during
the data entry process. Since it can be used with a wide range of fields, the Lexicon is a
powerful means of controlling the terms used in describing the museum’s collection. The
Lexicon not only includes support for industry-standard vocabularies but it also allows the
museum to create its own hierarchical thesaurus, including terms that represent its
collections and constituency. Users can enter and organize new terms as needed,
referencing synonyms, alternate terms, and homonyms. In addition to a traditional
thesaurus, the Lexicon enables museums to catalog any term—adding detail related to the
context. As an example, artists’ records can include artist names and pseudonyms, birth
and death dates, nationality, gender and other descriptive information about the artist.

An unlimited number of digitized materials of all types can be managed by ARGUS.net.

Images, animation, audio and video clips, PDFs, and other types of digital files can be
associated with collection records and are visible within the web catalog and its Image
Gallery display. Museums can either supply their own thumbnails or let ARGUS.net create
them.

Digital files can also be used to document standard museum processes such as
conservation. In addition, ARGUS.net maintains descriptive information about the content
of the digital files (e.g., resolution, dimensions in pixels, compression), as well as the
management information (e.g., photographer, date photographed, rights and permissions)
that museums require as part of their photographic services and documentation efforts.

An unlimited number of
digitized materials of all ARGUS.net includes a powerful
types can be managed by hierarchical Lexicon
ARGUS.net.

ARGUS.net’s Portal
positions your collection
as the gateway that
connects people and
knowledge.
ARGUS.net has an easy-
ARGUS.net is
multilingual and
compliant with the
Unicode standard
ARGUS.net’s INFORMATION MANAGE R PORTAL
The ARGUS.net Information Management Portal is a web interface to your collection. It
acts as a “web site in a box” to make relevant information immediately accessible to end
users while it positions your collection as the gateway that connects people and knowledge.
The ARGUS.net collections management system is now part of the ARGUS.net Information
Management Web page portal. With the portal, your valuable electronic collection is
instantly accessible to the public on the Internet, to your staff on your intranet, or both.
With its easy-to-use web-page-building front end, your site has a professionally designed
look, is fully functional, and is no longer isolated from your valuable collection data. There
is no need to export data: anything added or edited is instantly available the moment you
press the save button.
to-use web-page-
building front end
ARGUS.net’s INFORMATION MANAGEMENT PORTAL features:
 Multilingual and compliant with the Unicode standard. You can have a data-
entry portal that adds, edits, searches, and displays records in any language.
 ARGUS Site Map lets users discover your museum through standard search
engines and puts you in control. You can define what you want to be crawled.
 RSS Feed Generator allows you to proactively deploy dynamic information to
subscribers and publish the results of any search as an RSS feed.
 Usage Statistics allow you to see how your site is being used.
 Support for personalization, including “My Saved Searches,” “My Favorites”, and
“My Display”
 Serve Various Communities by configuring ARGUS.net to meet the needs of
different user communities. ARGUS.net can, for instance, dynamically display data
depending on user profiles.
 “Catalog-to-create” web pages allow you to create exhibit or event-specific web
pages easily and effectively—without duplicating efforts.
 APP BUILDER FOR MOBILE DEVICES
Utilizing Information Manager technology, ARGUS.net also provides a built-in App Builder
to build and quickly deploy exhibit applications for mobile devices such as the iPad and
iPhone. By creating mobile app portals to a museum’s collections, visitor experience will
be enriched with self-guided tours and virtual exhibits when visiting the museum.

Both museum professionals With an iPad, iPhone, or other multimedia portal device in hand, visitors can tour a gallery
and museum visitors will and let their fingers do the walking. At the end of the tour, the user can select their favorite
find that searching the
ARGUS.net collection exhibits and e-mail them to friends and family.
catalog is easy, powerful
and efficient

Build “Instant” virtual tours with the ARGUS.net App Builder

for mobile devices

STATE-OF-THE-ART TECHNOLOGY
ARGUS.net is based on industry standard technology, running on MS-SQL, Oracle, and
other commonly used RDBMS products.

In addition, ARGUS.net is integrated with SharePoint, the most widely used content
management system available today. This means that, from SharePoint, museum users
can search the collections management system, display results, and view images and
Hosted Service provides a related digital files. The integration includes taking advantage of the existing security
cost-effective alternative model (e.g., Active Directory), so that users’ search results reflect only data that is specific
to in-house systems
to their user profile (e.g., a Museum Educator would not be able to see Valuation and
Insurance information).

About Lucidea
Lucidea is the premier knowledge
management software company,
helping people navigate the ever
expanding universe of information,
turning it into actionable knowledge.
We achieve this by providing tools that
accelerate access to knowledge
resources, while simplifying their
management.
To learn more about Argus and how it
can help solve your knowledge
resource management challenges, visit
www.lucidea.com/argus
OPTION FOR 24/7 HOSTING SERVICE
SydneyPLUS/Questor customers can either host the software themselves, operating it on
their own institution’s server, or subscribe to the SydneyPLUS/Questor Hosted Service.
The Hosted Service provides a cost-effective alternative to in-house systems as
SydneyPLUS/Questor’s team of support staff, including people that understand both the
software and the technology, manage the hosted servers and provide related services (e.g.
daily backups, disaster recovery and data restoration services), as well as customer
support.
With the Hosted Service, ARGUS.net is installed on secure central servers. Customer
data and communications are protected using secure HTTP and encryption. That means
that museum staff members can access it to do their daily work with confidence their data
is protected. They can provide their users with appropriate access to the collection through
either the Web Catalog or the Portal.
DATA DRIVEN STRATEGY
A museum’s Web strategy must be data-driven, rather than depending on a set of static
web pages. This means that all metadata (descriptive information about content) must be
structured within a database for easier management, searching and delivery. ARGUS.net
is data-driven and dynamic. For example, as new objects are catalogued, new exhibits are
planned, and new events are announced, appropriate data sources within the Intranet and
on the ARGUS.net-based web site are automatically updated.
INTEGRATED WEB STRATEGY
Your intranet and the museum’s public Internet site don’t have to be separate systems.
Instead they can be parts of one unified system, with rock-solid security and permissions
management. Museum visitors with appropriate security rights can see relevant information
about your collection that your museum staff members see, not a copy of the data in an
island of information outside the institution’s firewall. By using the ARGUS.net “one
system” solution, you can avoid maintaining redundant and conflicting descriptions and
save scarce staff time and resources.