Find What’s Missing using Structured Search

Joy Tahan Ruddell

Museum & Collections Consultant

Structured Search is a powerful tool for finding specific values in your CMS—but it can do even more. With CatalogIt’s Structured Search, you can also identify what’s missing from your records, helping you spot gaps and keep your data complete. 

For example, perhaps you have a new volunteer who will photograph all the works in your collection without images. In this case, you’d start with a search for all the records in a specific folder without media attached.

The result produces two records without images, as you can see below:

You can also search for records missing other values, such as dimensions:

Utilizing the structured search function is invaluable for record clean-up and project management. Check out this MasterIt article for more tips and a step-by-step guide for using both structured and free-text searches!

About the Author

Joy Tahan Ruddell

Museum & Collections Consultant

Joy Tahan Ruddell has almost thirty years of collections and registration experience.  Prior to independent consulting, Joy coordinated the registration department at a large California museum which included insurance, loans, acquisitions, collections access and research, policy and procedure development and management, and intellectual property management. Working with staff museum-wide she developed programs that helped the community engage with collections. Joy has extensive experience with major collections projects including: inventories, collections moves, project management, acquisition and deaccession activities, NAGPRA projects, grant writing, insurance and risk management, and loan processing and organization. She specializes in helping museums build capacity through creative problem solving and determining scalable solutions. Extensive knowledge and advanced understanding of national standards allows her to assist with virtually any collections conundrum.