We know that many of you are interested in the challenges small museums face when digitising their collections. In the Southland region of New Zealand, there is a fantastic project that is tackling those challenges head-on.

Project Ark is a two-year pilot to start to catalogue Southland’s heritage collections and share them online. The Pilot is a collaboration between the Invercargill City Council, the Southland District Council and the Gore District Council. It is funded by their combined heritage rates and overseen by the Southland Regional Heritage Committee.

Skill sharing

Project Ark employs three roving cataloguers who bring their cataloguing, research, imaging and collection care skills to smaller museums. In return, museums share their deep knowledge of their collections and communities. It is this fusion and skill sharing that is at the heart of the Project.

The Pilot recognises the importance of the region working collectively to form a stronger and empowered community of care for collections and history. Project Ark lead David Luoni, and the team agreed: “It’s a partnership with museums to capture the local knowledge and stories that underpin their collections”.

Formal standards and procedures.

With the help of Vernon Systems, Project Ark uses eHive to fully catalogue the collections. Each museum has their own independent collection recorded on eHive and also publishes their records to a new eHive community called Museums of Southland, which functions as a regional portal. Records are also included in eHive.com and the NZ Museums website.

A lot of care and attention has gone into designing a solid foundation for cataloguing all the objects in Project Art. Project Ark has partnered with Vernon Systems to develop a set of standards to give each of the region’s museums a clear understanding of what information to enter into the database. This promotes best practice, self-help and consistency.

Te Papa’s National Services Te Paerangi is also a key partner, providing ongoing advice and several Expert Knowledge Exchanges across copyright, significance assessment and photography. NZ Micrographics provided their imaging systems experience and the imaging team at Auckland Museum also generously lent their expertise to the selection of photography equipment.

End Goal

To date, Project Ark’s team has worked with 10 of Southland’s museums to catalogue and share 50 items chosen by each museum to establish partnerships and the seed of the regional database.  For the remaining 18 months of the Pilot, the team will work with the volunteers at the Wyndham Museum to catalogue, image and pack its collection. The end goal is to partner with regional and national stakeholders and funders to resource the longer term roll out of the Project across all of Southland’s Museums.  You can track the Pilot’s progress via these links:

eHive

Facebook

Instagram

Putting your collection online can be a great way to reach out and engage a new audience. Having your collection in eHive opens it up to a larger audience, but a little help can go a long way. Rather than waiting for people to come to you why not highlight specific objects? Give your audience a reason to revisit your collection with regular sharing.

eHive is designed to let you quickly and easily share your objects and your eHive collection page with others.

Each public page includes options to share on a range of platforms. Here is an example of how they look.

The object that we have used for this demonstration is Canterbury Museum’s Sno-cat that can be found at https://ehive.com/collections/3003/objects/48/snocat.

click to enlarge

When you click on each of the social media logos another tab opens with all set up ready for sharing. Here are some examples of the Sno-Cat

Facebook

Twitter

Pintrest

Tumblr

Finally, you can share a link to your object which looks like this.

Good luck sharing.

Four steps to creating an eHive record

The eHive Create screen can be overwhelming. There are so many fields to fill out and different tabs to choose from. The good news is that you do not have to fill out every page or field.

You can return to a record whenever you like and add more details over time. You can even keep it private or save a draft until you choose to put it online.

All you need are 4 things.

1. A name or title
2. A brief description
3. A location
4. An image (No more than 1000 pixels on the longest side)

As an example let’s catalogue Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait at an Early Age. The original Rijksmuseum record has extensive information about the painting, 28 fields in 9 sections. While we are only looking for specific information, it is useful to see what information they have chosen to make public.

Creating our eHive object record

From your eHive account screen choose to Create New Records and we will choose Art as that is the most appropriate from our Rembrandt Self Portrait. We will go directly to Core Fields tab to begin.

Our first piece of information is for the Name/Title field where we will enter “Self-Portrait at an Early Age”.

This is followed by filling out the Brief Description. So far, so good.

Now we add the Current Location. If we simply type the text in the Current Location Field then a red outline appears and the text “The term must exist in the list” can be seen when you roll over the field.

What we need to do is click on the Term Pick List button at the end of the field and add our new location of “Storeroom”. Once the new location is entered you will be able to choose it as an option.

Now that you have created a new location of “Storeroom” you can select the term and save the record by clicking the save button at either the bottom or the top of the page.

Add an image

We are almost there. The last step is to include an image. From the record page choose Edit Images. This leads to a screen where we can drag and drop our Rembrandt. Remember to reduce the size of the image before adding it to eHive.

There are options to restrict the image’s access level, but we do not need to make any changes. We will leave it set on “Same as record access” and return to the object record.

That is everything

Congratulations. You have created your first object record. It is able to be published as it is, modified or added to in the future.

Good luck with your own collection in eHive.