Hi there! I'm Dick Van Dyke, hope you are, too!

Henry Irving's dead brassed off. He's spent all afternoon in a meeting trying to agree the metadata structure on the new collection management system that's to include the collections from the art gallery, museum and local studies. He's been struggling to get the museum staff to get their head around the fact that the public will be searching this system (which is how they got the funding for the thing) and that perhaps they could bear this in mind.

A case in point: a bone china tea service. You or I might want to find the whole service and be able to relate the cups with the saucers with the teapot, etc.

"They can do that by comparing the accession number prefixes," say the museum staff. "There's no need to create a parent record connecting all these items."

Even as he speaks Henry gets pinker and pinker in rage.

"If I hear one more bloody idiot tell me that they're a professional I'll scream! If they have to tell you they're professional they can't be."

I seem to have heard this before somewhere. ☺