James Connolly Development

Over the years, I've partnered with clients to design and maintain custom FileMaker Pro systems that streamline all operations.

The Roger Brown Study Collection (RBSC) was a house museum and special collection of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago that preserved the artist Roger Brown's Chicago collection and archives. The unique museum contained over 2,000 artworks, found objects, and domestic items on permanent display exactly as Roger Brown lived with them. It also held Brown's major collection of hundreds of works on paper, photographs, books, vinyl records, and a paper archive holding thousands of documents.

My databases made all of these materials fully accessible, creating a central hub for inventive museum education, extensive research, and well-organized collection management.

In 2025, the RBSC was relocated to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in a major acquisition. My databases helped streamline this move, tracking the locations of thousands of items and generating itemized box lists. The databases ensured all items went to their proper destination and could be traced back to the original location in the RBSC, preserving the legacy of Brown's original installation.

As Collection Manager of the RBSC, I developed and maintained interconnected FileMaker solutions that supported all aspects of operations—education, research, and collection management. I built custom tools that enabled staff to catalog and access information in new ways, including:

• A visual search interface for intuitively locating unlabeled objects on floor and elevation plans
• A self-guided tour app accessible through any smartphone for visitors to navigate the hundreds of objects on display
• Automated image importing, and intuitive cataloging, research, and location-tracking systems that accelerated accurate data entry
• Efficient interfaces that allowed staff to manage, compile research on, and form connections between over 3,400 museum objects, 1,950 works on paper, 5,400 archival documents, 3,100 photographs, 1,200 books, 300 vinyl records, and over 260 individuals.
• Reporting tools that allow the dynamic exporting of spreadsheets, images, or professional PDF reports for any purpose.

In addition to the complex museum database, I designed databases for our subcollections, including Roger Brown's documents archive, works on paper collection, photo archive, library, and vinyl record collection. These databases were connected to our central museum database, with custom interfaces that streamline their data entry and access. The RBSC archive database, for example, allowed us to automatically import thousands of scanned documents to make the RBSC archive accessible when the museum closed for construction.

When the RBSC was sold in 2025, these FileMaker solutions were instrumental in assessing, relocating, and transferring the collection and were included in the acquisition. The Roger Brown Study Collection now lives on at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, supported by their amazing staff and facilities.

During my time as Collection Manager of the RBSC, I also helped manage the Estate of Roger Brown. I built a database to streamline all estate processes and create a powerful research tool that significantly improved the scholarship of Brown's practice. As a result, our estate workflows took a fraction of the time they used to, and all of Brown's mature work became fully accessible through intuitive interfaces empowered by dynamic reporting and digital asset management tools.

Hundreds of gigabytes of digital assets were processed and managed through the database without being directly imported and stored, streaming the process of digitizing documentation of Brown's work and licensing publication-quality images.

Through powerful user interfaces that enabled fast and accurate data entry, more than 1,000 artworks were linked to more than 1,900 related pages from Brown's sketchbooks, tagged with over 400 subjects and themes, connected to exhibition histories, and paired with powerful reporting features for checklists, image licensing, and value tracking.

In addition to significantly streamlining our management protocols, this database enabled public-facing access through walled garden layouts and exporting tools, protecting our internal data through FileMaker's access privileges and robust security settings.

Through this database, we were able to send researchers and curators detailed professional PDF reports of Roger Brown artworks that may fit into their research or curatorial theme. When private collectors or museums contacted us regarding the Roger Brown artworks they owned, we could send them detailed PDFs providing their artwork's related sketches and exhibition history at the simple click of a button. The important work of Roger Brown could be explored, accessed, and shared like never before.

The Estate of Bertrand Goldberg holds more than 9,000 architectural drawings, photographs, and related materials spanning 184 major projects. To make these materials fully accessible, I developed a custom database to streamline data entry and created a robust data infrastructure tailored to architectural practices.

The system imported digitized files into their corresponding project records, with custom layouts to efficiently categorize thousands of architectural drawings by terms created by architect Geoff Goldberg:

• Stage of work — planning, concept, schematic, design development, design study, construction drawing
• Field of work — architectural, civil, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, structural
• Drawing content — number of bedrooms, aerials, charts/diagrams, elevations, furniture, interiors, perspectives, location plans, sections, site plans, and more
• Drawing scale(s) — standard architectural drawing scales, such as ¼" = 1' or 1" = 30'
• Date

Through these classifications, all drawings across all projects were accessible through a unique user interface designed for architectural papers.

Leveraging FileMaker's powerful scripting and user interface tools, I built a search and browsing system that requires no entry of search terms. Users can explore all 184 projects and 9,000+ materials intuitively, locating drawings of extreme specificity within a few clicks. Results can be saved into custom collections, managed through a user dashboard, and exported as PDFs or images.

This solution transformed the estate's archive into a fully accessible, searchable, and user-friendly resource allowing complex research inquiries to be answered in moments.

The Estate of Eugene von Bruenchenhein comprised over 8,300 works—photographs, paintings, sculptures, drawings, found objects, and audio recordings. I was hired to organize, catalog, and document the collection, while improving accessibility for professional management.

I built a custom FileMaker solution to streamline this process. The system included workflows to:

• Digitize thousands of photographs at publication-level resolution.
• Downscale images for optimized browsing speed and automatically import them into their corresponding records.
• Track and quickly update all object information, including location, movement, loan, sales, gift, condition, and conservation.
• Quickly classify works using dozens of custom terms tailored to von Bruenchenhein's practice.

With powerful search and reporting tools, the collection became more accessible than ever.

A little over a year after my hiring, the Kohler Art Foundation acquired the estate in a major acquisition covered by Artforum, ARTnews, and other leading publications. The FileMaker database was essential in enabling the collection to be fully assessed, appraised, conditioned, and tracked as it transitioned to its permanent home.

To quote ARTnews, "There are big acquisitions and then there are truly gigantic acquisitions. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has just landed one of the latter, acquiring a bounty of works by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein from the estate of the late artist[.]"