Howard Schickler Fine Art, based in New York, specializes in 19th and 20th century photography, paintings, drawings and rare books. The gallery maintains the largest collection of Soviet propaganda photography outside of Russia, painstakingly collected in the years immediately following the fall of communism by Howard Schickler and fellow collector David Lafaille.

Over the years, Mr. Schickler has been enthusiastically using the internet to support his business--launching his web site in 1996 and partnering in the first ever online art auction in 1998. In 2000, he contacted clue inc, desiring to develop a web application that would help his staff organize his collection, meet his insurance company's requirements of keeping a detailed accounting of the individual works at an offsite location, and allow him to manage his business from anywhere in the US or abroad.

The challenge of allowing a small number of people to manage a large inventory of rare objects in varying formats, bundles, locations and conditions is substantial. Some objects are one-of-a kind, others are part of numbered editions that require detailed notation of minute differences in condition. Some are part of a set which can be split and sold piecemeal, while others have special sales conditions, or may be part of a wider body of work with a provenance as historically important as the work itself. Each must be researched, photographed, catalogued, and valued, both for sale as well as insurance purposes.

clue's role was to design a scalable information architecture and develop reliable applications to streamline the data management process and automate the creation of exhibitions and data collection. The formal data model encompassed object-relational as well as more traditional entity-relationship modelling, an intuitive gallery management and reporting tool for manipulating the data, a front-end web site where customers could browse the collections, and supporting tools for image manipulation and presentation.

Working with the gallery, clue rigorously gathered requirements, developed a detailed formal understanding of business processes and art terminology, and implemented a scalable and intuitive web application meeting these goals.

The result of the 8 month collaboration between clue inc and Howard Schickler Fine Art was a "gallery engine" that not only catalogs and assigns inventory numbers to each work of art in the collection, but also tracks invoices, consignments, clients and artists, allows modeling of complex art records such as numbered and unnumbered editions and multiple edition portfolios, automatically handles resizing of high-resolution scans for thumbnailing and detail pages, provides keyword search and reporting by status, allows the gallery staff to build customized exhibitions of works in the database and gives the gallery control over which inventory items are visible to the public online.

The entire management system integrates seamlessly with their web site to allow customers to search works for sale, browse exhibitions and collections, and read artist biographies. Howard Schickler Fine Art no longer has to worry about updating their site when a work is sold--once an invoice is generated, the item is automatically taken offline, and new items show up online immediately once they're catalogued and assigned an inventory number. As a bonus, asset management for insurance purposes has become an effortless side effect of meeting their business goals.