Modern detective work is less about hunches and card indexes and more about rolling reviews of what teams know, with computers to help join the evidential dots.
Museum collections, and archives in general, are normally catalogued in a collection catalogue, traditionally in a card index, but nowadays in a computerized database.
Outside the world of professional information technology, the term "database" is sometimes used casually to refer to any collection of data (perhaps a spreadsheet, maybe even a card index).