The SPECTRUM standard has been revised and republished several times since the first publication in 1994, with the publication of the most recent edition, SPECTRUM 4.0, in March 2011.
Licences to use SPECTRUM
All registered users of Collections Link can download SPECTRUM 4.0, free. Registered users of Collections Link are automatically granted a licence to use the standard for non-commercial purposes from the time they first register.
You can download the licences for SPECTRUM here:
There is also further information for SPECTRUM Licence holders in the Collections Link Terms and Conditions of Use.
The Current Edition of SPECTRUM
The current edition of SPECTRUM is SPECTRUM 4.0, accompanied by an Appendix.
SPECTRUM 4.0 – contains the 21 SPECTRUM Procedures represented in flow diagram format, and includes the information groups relevant to each procedure.
- Download SPECTRUM 4.0 as a single pdf
- Download SPECTRUM 4.0 flow diagrams
- Download SPECTRUM 4.0 Procedures as individual pdfs
If you are a museum practitioner you will probably only need to refer to SPECTRUM 4.0. Specialist users such as Information Managers and software suppliers may want to download SPECTRUM 4.0 Appendix 1 which contains the Information Requirements for SPECTRUM 4.0, and the SPECTRUM 4.0 Schema.
Hard copies of SPECTRUM 4.0 and SPECTRUM 4.0 Appendix 1 are available to buy at cost from the Collections Trust Shop.
Internationally, some countries are translating and localisng the SPECTRUM standard, under SPECTRUM Local.
SPECTRUM DAM
The Collections Trust has published SPECTRUM Digital Asset Management (SPECTRUM DAM), as a companion to SPECTRUM. SPECTRUM DAM has been created as a best practice guide to integrating digital asset management into an existing Collections Management practice based on (or compatible with) SPECTRUM.
The application of the SPECTRUM standard
The Collections Trust publishes SPECTRUM Advice, a series of fact sheets which explore the application of the SPECTRUM standard, as well as Using SPECTRUM to Sustain Collections, which uses case studies to explore the link between good collections managment and sustainable collections. See also, SPECTRUM Resources for all SPECTRUM related resources published on Collections Link.
Previous editions of SPECTRUM
See the SPECTRUM Archive for previous editions of the SPECTRUM Standard, and see here for a brief history of SPECTRUM
