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Track Every Mile: Using CatalogIt for Traveling Exhibitions
Moving objects between venues is one of the most complex parts of organizing a traveling exhibition. Each leg of the journey—whether it involves changing couriers, carriers, or packing methods—comes with its own logistics. That’s where CatalogIt’s Shipment profile makes a difference.
With the Shipment profile, you can create a dedicated record for every stage of the exhibition’s travel. It enables you to document key details like shipping dates, carriers, packing methods, tracking numbers, and condition reports. By linking each shipment to the related Exhibition and Loan Out profiles, you keep all the information connected, organized, and accessible to your team in real time.
Scenario: Tracking a Multi-Venue Exhibition with the Shipment Profile
Planning an exhibition is no small task- but tracking it as it travels from venue to venue? That’s where things can really get complicated. Fortunately, CatalogIt’s Shipment profile helps keep everything organized, visible, and under control—no matter how far your objects travel.
Let’s look at a real-world example: You’re organizing an exhibition of 64 paintings at your museum in San Francisco (Anytown Museum). The works are on loan from 52 different lenders. After the show opens at your museum, it travels to three additional venues: Othertown Museum in Chicago, HomeTown Museum in New York, and finally FancyTown Museum in Paris.
Here’s where it gets interesting: The paintings travel from San Francisco to Chicago and New York via exclusive-use, climate-controlled trucks. From New York to Paris, they’re shipped by cargo plane (the crates are too large for a passenger flight) and accompanied by a courier, coordinated by a customs agent. After the Paris venue, the works are flown directly back to San Francisco with the courier. From there, each loan is returned to its respective lender.
That’s a complex journey, which is why each leg gets its own Shipment profile in CatalogIt. Each profile captures:
- Trucking arrangements
- Flight and cargo details
- Courier and customs information
- Condition checks
- Insurance coverage
- Key dates
To further streamline tracking, use the Shipping Container profile to document each crate’s materials, dimensions, and contents. This not only improves accuracy but also allows you to generate a comprehensive crate list for the entire exhibition, keeping registrars, shippers, and couriers on the same page.
Each Shipment and Shipping Container profile is linked to the Exhibition profile, so you can view the entire journey in one place. Once the exhibition returns to San Francisco, you can create individual Shipment profiles for each returning loan and link them to their corresponding Loan Out profiles, which are also tied to the exhibition.
The result is a clear, connected, and comprehensive record—tracking every movement, every handoff, and every detail. Less last-minute scrambling, fewer surprises, and greater confidence.
Read our MasterIt article on the Shipment Profile for more information.