NZMuseums.co.nz is a website brought about by National Services Te Paerangi (which forms a part of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington) in partnership with Vernon Systems Ltd. It features a directory of 400 New Zealand museums and galleries, who also have the opportunity to catalogue and contribute their collection items online. This is the first step in showcasing collections online for the majority of participants. Because the NZMuseums site is built utilising eHive as its foundation, the content that is on the site is also present within eHive as our very first community.
17th December 2009 Update
Over the last month we have gone through several technical upgrades to the eHive site, upgrading the operating system, application server and Java version. These changes will give us a good foundation for the planned enhancements in the coming year.
The latest upgrade to eHive included:
- Bug fixes for the application we use internally to bulk load data into the eHive website
- Bug fix for image derivative creation which was not running in some cases. This was caused by the upgrade to Java 1.6 earlier in the month.
- Social booking button added to the object, account and community pages to make it easy to share links on social networking sites to pages you like on eHive
28 October 2009 Update
There was a minor upgrade of eHive on 28th October 2009 which included:
– New Explore page Most Interesting Objects
This page ranks object records on eHive by several factors, including the amount of text information, the number of images of the object, the number of comments and tags and the number of views of the page.
– Underlying changes to support the NZMuseums search widget. We’ll be able to show you the widget in the next week or so!
– Bug fixes. Two bugs were fixed in this release. Deleted objects that were restored from the Recycle Bin were not appearing in public searches and in some combinations users were getting a server error on publishing an object record.
15th September 2009 eHive Upgrade
This upgrade of eHive has been completed. There are major additions including new export options and a simplified page address structure.
Exporting enhancements
This upgrade includes new export formats: Export public, core or full record details in comma separated values format (CSV) and Microsoft Excel format.
This means you could easily export your records for use in Open Office or Microsoft Excel format. Each export offers options for how repeating fields (like tags or primary creator/makers) will be separated in the final data. This data can be separated by commas, new lines or tags.
Standard Reports
New PDF based standard reports are included in this release. The first two add to the functionality of administrating communities:
Community Administration Reports
• Summary report – easily review the total of pending, approved and declined members for your community. You can also view the total number of published object records contributed to date.
• Download a list of approved members for your community.
Object report
A new label report for printing exhibition object labels has been added. This prints key description information about the object with a small image. You can use standard full sheet sticky label stationery if the label is to be affixed to the wall.
Search Friendly URLs
The web address structure within eHive has had a serious reworking.
As an example, the current object page addresses look like:
http://ehive.com/index.php?option=com_ehive&task=showDetail&recordIdSet=2406
In this release the addresses have changed to a shorter more consistent format. For example, the above URL has changed to:
http://ehive.com/account/3404/object/534995 (NOTE: May 2016 – The URL format has now changed to https://ehive.com/collections/3404/objects/534995)
The new address structure gives several benefits:
- More readable for users
- Better indexing by search engines
- Easier editing of the addresses to get to other content (e.g. open the page for a specific record by typing in the URL)
- Better grouping of content belonging to one account (museum/collection)
- Full support of the web browser back and forward buttons.
Object pages are now always under the “ehive.com/account” adddress structure, allowing us in the future to provide web statistics for all object page views for each specific account.
The changes are also laying the groundwork for our future public application programming interfaces (APIs). The old website addresses will automatically redirect to the new style addresses.
User Interface Overhaul
The HTML and CSS of all pages in eHive, including all of the admin pages, has been reworked. The main changes are:
- Simpler validated HTML/CSS giving faster page download
- Crisper more consistent appearance
- More page specific detail is now included in the web browser page title
- All ‘tool’ links now generically appear in a Tools section on the right hand side of the page
- New image slider and zoom features on the account profile and object detail image sections
- New icons to indicate the type of object (art, library etc) in summary results views
- Label view has been removed to simplify the results navigation
- Detail view is accessed by clicking on an individual results from the summary or lightbox view and then using the browser Back button to go back to the results
- Minor changes to support Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome
- Faster performance throughout the site.
Getting a consistent breadcrumb trail across the site has been difficult as we work with the Joomla article content (news, featured clients and community) and eHive application content (accounts and objects). We’re still doing work on this and a new breadcrumb trail is planned for later in the year.
Acquisition Records
There is still work remaining on the development of separate Acquisition Records to allow you to track common acquisition information for one or more objects in a single acquisition record and to track acquisitions before they are approved.
The acquisition record includes the source of the acquisition, the method by which it came into the collection, notes, date, a description of the whole acquisition, price and valuation. Acquisition records can be created before the cataloguing of the individual objects if necessary, and be linked to one or more object records that share the same acquisition information at any time.
The Acquisition Record functions have been split into the next major upgrade later this year.
August 2009 Update
The upcoming August update includes a major upgrade of eHive functionality, both behind the scenes and for eHive users.
Exporting enhancements
Currently, exporting records is in XML format only. We are finalising work on further exporting formats, including exporting public, core or full record details in comma separated values format (CSV) for use in other applications.
This means you could easily import your records into Open Office for example. We’re also adding export options for the same subsets of fields in Microsoft Excel format.
Acquisition Records
The development of separate Acquisition Records allows you to track common acquisition information for one or more objects in a single acquisition record and to track acquisitions before they are approved.
The acquisition record includes the source of the acquisition, the method by which it came into the collection, notes, date, a description of the whole acquisition, price and valuation. Acquisition records can be created before the cataloguing of the individual objects if necessary, and be linked to one or more object records that share the same acquisition information at any time.
Standard Reports
Our first new standard reports are being released this August. The first two add to the functionality of administrating communities:
Community Administration Reports
• Summary report – easily review the total of pending, approved and declined members for your community. You can also view the total number of published object records contributed to date.
• Download a list of approved members for your community.
Additional standard object based reports are planned to cover basic collections management functions. In the next release after August we will be adding entry receipts (based on the Acquisition Record information) and exhibition labels.
Search Friendly URLs
The web address structure within eHive is getting a serious reworking.
As an example, the current object page addresses look like:
http://ehive.com/index.php?option=com_ehive&task=showDetail&recordIdSet=2406
In the August release we’ll be changing to a more human readable format. For example, the above URL will probably change to:
http://ehive.com/object/2406
(we’re just finalising how accounts and objects will fit within the URL)
The changes to the address style has a few benefits:
• More readable for users
• Better indexing by search engines
• Easier editing of the addresses to get to other content (e.g. open the page for a specific record by typing in the URL).
The changes are also laying the groundwork for our future public application programming interfaces (APIs). We’ll be adding code to redirect links to the old style addresses to the new addresses.
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