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Qi The Universal Content Management Solution

SPECTRUM compliant
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Qi collection management system on a desktop computer, a tablet and mobile devices.
  • Illustration of Est. 2002

    Qi Qi capitalises from Keepthinking’s 17-year experience working with organisations in the public, arts and cultural sectors.

  • Illustration of 1=8

    Qi = Collection management + Content management + Asset management + Event booking, Ticket sales + Online shop + Donations + Visitor information + ...

  • Illustration of a museum with a 200+ flag.

    More than two hundred museums, galleries, local councils and other institutions trust and use Qi every day.

  • Illustration of 2017 updated!

    Totally new, fresh, beautiful interface, using web standards and open source technologies. Qi is powerful, flexible, fast and easy to use.

Key features

Qi is designed for ultimate flexibility, collaboration, ease of use and speed for any type of information management.

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Dashboard
  • 2

    2 All content at a glance

    All sections and records, including drafts, in one comprehensive list.
  • 3

    3 Recent activity

    Diagram highlighting the recent activity across all content and for all users of Qi. See if people have been working hard.
  • 4

    4 Easy access

    Quick access to recent changes, records to approve and your own drafts in progress.
  • 6

    6 Resources and help

    See disk usage and database usage limits. Access online help, including video tutorials, PDF resources and online manuals.
qi page record
  • 1

    1 Extensible content types and nodes

    Manage any type of content with one tool. Bring all of your content and assets under one roof and save time and money on training and integration as well as maintenance and licensee fees.
  • 2

    2 Global access to content

    Access to all content types across all sections. Configurable high-priority search fields and criteria and scoring for search by relevance. Fully indexed, with universal search and replace.
  • 3

    3 Multi-lingual content and translation workflow

    Enter content in any number of languages, including precise workflow for translation jobs. Unleash the power of Google Translate between any number of language pairs.
  • 4

    4 Inline feedback messages

    Feedback is essential when performing tasks. Messages, notifications or warnings are displayed when needed without breaking your workflow.
  • 5

    5 Search & replace

    A recent addition is the Search & Replace feature which can be applied on any field of a record.
  • 6

    6 Flexible, customisable field types and validation rules

    There are over fifteen types of field to choose from (e.g. text, rich text, lists, dates, times, colour, etc) and over twenty different validation rules (e.g. required, numeric, mix/max length, etc).
  • 7

    7 Rich text

    Rich Text with multiple formats is available through a friendly interface. The text can also be seen and edited in html format.
  • 8

    8 Granular user permissions

    Granular user permissions allow ultimate control of who may read, add to, upload, modify or approve content and media assets, distinct for each combination of type of content and node and up to individual fields. Everything may be done by the same person (in smaller teams) or by extremely diversified groups of people. All with great simplicity.
Screen of a collection record.
  • 1

    1 Search and edit existing records

    Powerful search facilities. All search fields are configurable for each type of record.
  • 2

    2 Record summary

    Configurable summary record information is displayed at the top for easy identification of records.
  • 3

    3 Flexible and customisable input screens and tabs

    For ease of use, organisation of information and access rights, fields may be divided into different tabs. The flexibility of Qi even allows to use different fields in different nodes for the same type of content (e.g. a painting is a painting, but if it’s part of the museum collection it will needs different fields, compared to when it is on loan for a temporary exhibition).
  • 4

    4 Packages

    Records can be added to packages. You can then search on specific packages or use them to create relationships.
  • 5

    5 Powerful reporting

    Qi includes sophisticated import, export and report capabilities. Export in XML, Excel, JSON, PDF and Word. Import from CSV, XML.
  • 6

    6 Audit trail and versioning

    The entire history of each field in each record is stored within Qi and never deleted. You may immediately recover a previous value, see who changed it, as well as undelete a record or a media asset.
  • 7

    7 Content relationships

    One of the real strengths and the biggest difference of Qi compared to other system lies in its ability to manage relationships. Any element of content may be associated with any other element, across multiple types and nodes.
Screen of the media library, images section.
  • 1

    1 Complete asset management (Images, Video, Audio, Flash)

    A sophisticated Digital Asset Management is integrated with Qi and it is prefigured to accept assets in over 400 file formats, including all popular types of electronic documents, images, audio/video and rich media (typically Flash)
  • 2

    2 Automatic multiple resizing of images and video formats

    The whole media library can be simply reprocessed in the background to include the new sizes. Video assets are automatically converted to as many formats as required. Typically, content managers upload H.264 MPEG-4 videos, that are converted by Qi into required extra formats to be displayed using HTML5 on any platforms, including mobiles.
  • 3

    3 Category / Structure / Folder manager

    Media files (images, documents and multimedia) are divided by type and organised in folders.
  • 4

    4 Catalogues and folders

    Media files (images, documents and multimedia) are divided by type and organised in folders. Team permissions for reading and writing.
  • 5

    5 Download

    Download media in different sizes, all depending on your user permissions.
  • 6

    6 Visual browsing

    Visual browsing within the Media Library and when you want to associate an image to a record make tasks easier.
  • 7

    7 Playing and zooming

    Inline zooming of images and playing of multimedia content, using ultra compatible HTML5 technology.
Screen of the shop in Qi
  • 1

    1 Search orders

    You can search for orders by status, order id, customer name or product information.
  • 2

    2 Orders listing

    Each order can be automatically sub-divided into any number of sub-orders by type of product (or by groups of types), so different departments in your organisation can separately fulfil each part: what this means is that retail can ship the books and postcards, while development deals with donations.
  • 3

    3 Order summary

    Full summary of the order is displayed at the top for easy identification.
  • 4

    4 Order details

    Everything you need to know about an order displayed clearly with links to the customer and products. You can also see who placed an order but failed to pay and deal with each case promptly and accurately.
Screen of the teams section
  • 1

    1 Teams & users list

    Everything may be done by the same person (in smaller teams) or by extremely diversified groups of people. All with great simplicity.
  • 2

    2 Global rights

    Users might or might not have access to create new users and team, view or edit the media library or the configuration of the database.
  • 3

    3 Media catalogues

    Create media catalogues according to your needs and set the level of access for different teams. You may even specify the max image size a team can view.
  • 4

    4 Content permissions

    Granular user permissions allow ultimate control of who may read, add to, upload, modify or approve content and media assets, distinct for each combination of type of content and node and going as far as including individual fields. This allows you to create entirely customised interfaces for each working team, to show each user only the information he or she needs to see and work on.

Testimonials

Over two hundred between museums, collections, libraries, archives, local councils, magazines, as well as commercial organisations have chosen Qi to manage and present some or all of their content and information.

  • DiaBeacon2006

    Dia Art Foundation

    Collection management, Content Management, Website, Online Shop

    Qi provides Dia a content management system for our website and a collection management system on a single platform. It’s great not to hassle with an integration and with a small staff, we need the efficiencies gained by having all of this data in a single system. Our staff finds the interface intuitive and easy to use. It offers a lot of flexibility which is necessary with multiple venues, diverse programs, and a mobile staff. We are starting our 4th year with Qi and are glad we chose it.
    Sara Tucker

    Sara Tucker

    IT Director

  • fleming collection

    Fleming Collection

    Collection management, Content Management, Website

    I find Qi very simple, user-friendly, and very intuitive. The process of creating it was also great - I had everything wanted to include in it, but working with Cristiano and Claire, they were able to suggest brilliant ways of incorporating these things into structures which would work, and suggested extras which hadn't even occurred to me, but ended up being really useful. The things I like about it is how easy it is to use in comparison to other database systems I have used in the past.
    Brittany Harbidge

    Brittany Harbidge

    Website and Collections Manager

  • Some of the PCF catalogues placed on top of each other.

    The Public Catalogue Foundation

    Collection managment, Crowd Sourcing, Supervisor Interface, Website

    Qi’s flexibility allows us to speedily manage multiple collections, providing a sophisticated user journey when travelling between different hierarchies of data. The intuitive interface is accessible to the full range of user, from the basic to the highly specialised. It’s a fantastic product – functional and beautifully designed.
    Daniel Whibley

    Daniel Whibley

    Head of Editorial and Production

Current users

The following organisations are among the many that have adopted Qi for their content.

  • Ashmolean Museum logo
  • Paul Mellon Centre Logo
  • The Public Catalogue Foundation logo
  • The_Burlington_Magazine2018
  • Clyfford Still
  • Museum of the City of New York
  • West Kowloon logo
  • Lloyds HEC
  • SainsburyArchive
  • Dia Art Foundation logo
  • Provincie Antwerpen
  • K11 Art Foundation logo
  • Asia Art Archive logo
  • white_cube
  • Horniman Museum & Gardens logo
  • NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission logo
  • Dubai Expo 2020
  • DIVA
  • The Courtauld Institute of Art
  • The House of Illustration logo
  • The De Laszlo Archive Trust Logo
  • Artist' Collecting Society logo
  • The Wedgwood Museum logo
  • Shakespeare Birthplace Trust logo
  • The Fitzwilliam Museum logo
  • Asia Society logo
  • Contemporary Art Society logo
  • Shaker Museum logo
  • The Media Majlis
  • Pallant House Gallery
  • fleming collection
  • ox_logo
  • Cineteca di Bologna logo
  • The William Morris Gallery logo

Detailed specifications

Download detailed specifications document.

Flexibility

  • Ability to configure cluster of nodes for multiple organisations Coming soon
  • Ability to configure nodes, types of content and fields Updated
  • Customisable search fields Updated
  • Ability to adapt to any data structure and design
  • Complete customisation of content types and relationships
  • Extensible content types and nodes
  • Ability to re-use content and assets
  • Support for foreign characters / UTF-8
  • Interface localisation in any language
  • Metadata, classification and tagging
  • Support for multiple sites/repositories within the same database

User Interface

  • Dashboard with quick search, links and activity graph New
  • Universal full-text indexing and search, with results sorted by relevance New
  • Quick access to frequently used content New
  • Browse hierarchical tree of records New
  • Flexible and customisable input screens and tabs
  • Flexible, customisable field types and validation rules
  • Comprehensive keyboard shortcuts and access keys
  • Support for drag-and-drop features
  • Support for friendly URLs
  • Support for comments, task assignment and notes between editors
  • Spell Checker
  • WYSIWYG Editor, based on web standards
  • Drag-and-drop to upload New

Content Management

  • Create multilingual content & translation workflow New
  • Shop dashboard with analytics New
  • Shop management (Products, memberships, donations etc)Updated
  • Content scheduling
  • Cascading metadata
  • Configuration editor
  • Relationship management Updated
  • Relationship staging Coming soon
  • Content staging
  • Create content packages New
  • Link content packages New
  • Multiple repositories and support for multiple languages within the same repository
  • Reporting in Excel, XML, JSON and PDF
  • Web-based administration
  • User and Group permission manager per cluster Coming soon
  • User and Group permission manager per content type
  • User and Group permission manager per individual field
  • User and Group permission manager per individual relationship
  • Workflow manager Coming soon
  • Integration with Google Docs Coming soon

Asset Management

  • Create media catalogues New
  • Team permissions for reading and writing catalogues New
  • Upload multiple files New
  • Associate images with files New
  • Associate images and documents with audio and video New
  • Group media assets by folder
  • Display meta-file information
  • Zoom images New
  • Preview audio and video
  • Complete document and asset management (Images, Documents, Video, Audio, Flash)
  • Category / Structure / Folder Manager
  • Automatic multiple resizing of images
  • Upload Word, Excel, PDF and more than 400 file types
  • Automatic encoding of multimedia assets to allow serving to multiple platforms (including tablets and mobiles) Coming soon
  • Multiple encoded versions of the same video Coming soon

Performance and Scalability

  • API in XML/JSON to integrate with third-parties New
  • HTML5 Compliant
  • Advanced multi-layered caching using Memchach
  • Support for shared, dedicated, cloud and multi-tier environments
  • Support for database replication
  • Support for MySQL and ODBC database engines (native support for MS SQL and Oracle in October 2012)
  • Support for load balancers and scale-on-demand environments
  • Interoperability
  • AJAX Support
  • Content syndication (RSS, ATOM)
  • Metadata Standards Support
  • Mobile support
  • UTF-8 support
  • WAI Compliant
  • Web Services Support (SOAP, REST)
  • Customisable support for LIDO/Dublin Core
  • Support for OAI/Harvesting servers and interfaces

Security

  • SSL Support
  • Audit trail and versioning Updated
  • Content Approval and Workflow
  • Granular, role-based Permissions
  • Statistics of login history and activity Coming soon
  • Support for LDAP, X.509 and Active directory Coming soon

Advanced features

  • SPECTRUM partnerhip
  • SPECTRUM compliant
  • Flexible, customisable RESTful API (JSON/XML) Updated
  • Fully de-normalised content available for export Updated
  • Fully indexed, using cached de-normalised records, updated in real-time Updated
  • Boolean searches New
  • Configurable high-priority search fields and criteria and scoring for search by relevance New
  • Integrated third party authorities, link into AAT, Geonames, VIAF, Wikipedia, Library of Congress and anyone else with an API Updated
  • Create library records from ISBN New
  • Thesauri, include any type of vocabulary, from Getty ULAN, AAT and extending to any XML or SKOS based ontology
  • Direct interfaces to DBPedia and Wikipedia as alternative authorities
  • MARC 21 compatible fields for library repositories Coming soon
  • Configurable approval workflows Coming soon
  • Mobile record movements, conditions and conservation activities Coming soon

Technology

We offer: training programmes, comprehensive documentation, in-application help, modular front-end framework and pluggable, RESTful API among other things.

Web Server

  • Apache 2 (Recommended)

Programming languages

  • Back end: PHP 5.3, based on the CodeIgniter 2.1 MVC framework
  • Front end: HTML5 with CSS3
  • Javascript: Qi is designed to work without Javascript enabled; however we do recommend JS enabled browsers

Database server

  • MySQL version 5.1 or greater
  • PostgreSQL New
  • Any ODBC compliant database New
  • Microsoft SQL Server Coming soon
  • Oracle Coming soon

Interface languages

  • British English
  • American English
  • Italian
  • Any other language on request

Accessibility

  • Compliant with WAI Level AAA guidelines

Web browser support

  • Internet Explorer (latest 3 versions)
  • Firefox (latest 3 versions)
  • Safari (latest 3 versions)
  • Google Chrome (latest 3 versions)
  • Mobile Safari (latest 3 versions)
  • Mobile Opera (latest 3 versions)