The fabled story of the growth of New Zealand pottery company Crown Lynn is one most New Zealanders are familiar with. Becoming the largest pottery company in the Southern Hemisphere in the 1970s and fostering young design talent with their Crown Lynn Design Awards are just some aspects of the business we admire.
Read more about the history and see Crown Lynn objects as catalogued by the Portage Ceramics Trust. The trust was established to catalogue a private Crown Lynn collection, and as it is currently closed to the public this is a unique opportunity to learn more about it.

Go to Portage Ceramics Trust »

The NZMuseums site has been up and running for one month now and has had great feedback. We are pleased at the positive reception it has had within the sector and from the general public. We have done a number of updates of the site, including minor tweaks behind the scenes and loading of new content. In the first month the site had 5,500 visitors from 60 countries (and we’re fast approaching the 10,000th visitor milestone!).

It has been fantastic to see the site grow, with hundreds of search tags added to objects and discussions appearing against objects like this carved tobacco pipe..

We’ve had several new collections of items added, including highlights of Waipu Museum‘s collection.

There have also been some nice mentions in the press, including being NZ IT magazine Netguide‘s site of the month.

We’re pleased to have reached a major milestone in the development of eHive. On September 17th 2008, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa hosted the official launch of the NZMuseums website. The website provides a directory of 400 museums in New Zealand and showcases the collections of 50 of these as at the launch date. The museum information, collection catalogues and images are all stored in eHive.

You can view the website at www.nzmuseums.co.nz

Highlights include:
Museum photos from 120 museums
Thousands of objects of all collection types
Contributions from many smaller museums

90% of the content was not previously accessible on the Internet and many of the museums did not previously have a web presence.

The project is the culmination of a two year partnership between National Services Te Paerangi, a team within Te Papa, and Vernon Systems. National Services helped local museums with cataloguing their collections for the new site. Vernon Systems developed the functionality of the website while McGovern Online did the graphical design. We worked closely with the contributors to convert the data into eHive. From November the contributors will be able to update their museum and object information online.

Thank you to everyone who has helped to get the website ready for the launch. We’re already working on the last step – completing the eHive data entry screens for November!

Paul

This is where we keep you up to date with the latest news and information about eHive’s progress, developments and updates as they happen. eHive is a constantly evolving product, and because it is web-based, all updates will appear immediately as they happen.

At the moment we are spreading the buzz about eHive around the world, while our team prepares for our launch date in December 2008.

The eHive Team