Owaka Museum is situated in the beautiful Catlins region of the South Island of New Zealand. This award- winning museum is a new facility, and has been a real focal point for the community since it opened in 2007. Its collections detail the pioneering history of the area, with focus also on the coastal environment and its unique history. The collections reveal fantastic tales of early industry, life in the remote pioneering community, and the challenges of farming and living in the demanding climate.

Go to Owaka Museum »

Two minor updates to eHive were performed during January 2009. These included several fixes and enhancements:

• Stylesheet changes to fix page displays in some browsers (particularly Internet Explorer 6.0)
• Fixed a problem saving changes to the edit (create) screen
• Added new sorting options in the result views
• Reduced the compression in image thumbnails to give better quality

‘User Tagging of Online Cultural Heritage Items’ is a paper that has been prepared by a team of four staff from various Australian museums, archives and libraries on the value of user tagging. The paper is the result of a survey of Australian and New Zealand cultural institutions, and comes to some interesting conclusions.

With regard to eHive, it is interesting to note the conclusions drawn by the authors that user tagging of records not only helps broaden interpretation of collections, but is invaluable in “engaging and creating communities from afar” (piii), and “giving the public a sense of ownership” (piii).

The paper is brief but includes the survey, responses, bibliography and a handy glossary of terms.

Follow the link below to read the article in PDF format

User Tagging of Online Cultural Heritage Items

The beta version of eHive is currently available. If you want to request a beta account now, write to us at info@ehive.com

The eHive team is hard at work enhancing features and creating new ways to get the most out of eHive. There are several features that you will see on eHive in the coming months.

The major focus for the development team over the last month has been the community functions of the system. With eHive, all content is stored in a giant database running on parallel servers. Individual account holders (e.g. a museum or private collector) can manage their collection in their own private area just like they would in a traditional package installed on their computer. However, having all of the information stored in one place makes it very easy for users to present new groups of information that cut across institutional or collection boundaries.

To facilitate this we created the concept of a community. User can create new communities that represent any thematic or geographical groupings of collection information. Users can then join communities and mark particular objects from their collection that should be part of that community. Website visitors will be able to see who the members of the community are, browse the objects in the community, see common tags of members and objects in the community and see random selections of content.

This area of development is now largely complete. NZ Museums will be one example of the future communities on eHive.com. Museums in New Zealand can join the NZ Museums community and mark highlights of their collection from their individual accounts as being part of the community.

Paul