Collective Access is a popular, extensible open source Collection Management System designed to support the collection management functions of galleries, libraries, archives and museums.

Although the Collective Access developers and community maintain excellent documentation for the project – including a Getting Started guide – this documentation lacks exemplars that can be used to quickly initiate new users (domain non-experts, in particular) that have been charged with installing and configuring a new system (e.g. for the sake of evaluation).

As such, this walkthrough provides a small dataset and step-by-step instructions that are designed to guide an uninitiated developer or systems administrator through the installation and population of a Collective Access instance. The walkthrough provides commentary on:

• A typical use case
• The installation process
• Data mapping and data import
• Media import
• Modifying fields

This walkthrough does not cover the totality of the vernacular, structure and capabilities of Collective Access; rather, this walkthrough aims to convey the minimal amount of information necessary to familiarise oneself with the system and begin to make meaningful use of its documentation.