eHive collection profile

Collection Description:

A collection of United States uniformed services visor cap devices. The collection is focused on variations of devices by different makers and areas of production.
The time period of the collection is from the late 1890’s to 1980’s.

Object of Interest:

Name/Title
South East Asian made, US Army Officer’s cap device.

About this object
South East Asian made, US Army Officer’s cap device.
Note unusual head style of the eagle.

Maker
Unknown, Theater made

Date Made
1941-1945

Period
WWII

Place Made
United States

Medium and Materials
Metal

Object Type
Army Officer’s Cap Device

Object number
RPV331

Copyright Licence  
All rights reserved

Howick Historical Village is a living history museum in seven acres of grounds and gardens and depicts a Fencible settlement in the period from 1840 to 1880. The Royal New Zealand Fencibles were pensioned-off British soldiers who came to New Zealand with wives and families, ready to protect the city of Auckland should it come under attack.

The collection at the Howick Historical Village ranges from art to furniture, textiles to archives, and aims to show the period of early Auckland life between 1840-1880.

You can see the Howick Historical Village collection on eHive here.

Living History is presented at the village with costumed staff and Live days every third Sunday of the month. On these days the village bustles with a working forge, cooking over open fires, forgotten crafts and activities for the kids.

Like many museums, the Howick Historical Village team found that after many years and many different staff, management of the collection needed some attention. Parts of the collection had been catalogued by different teams in PastPerfect, Vernon CMS, and eHive. A lot of time and effort had been invested in these databases, but none were complete.

The decision was made to bring all the previous collection data together into one CMS. eHive was chosen as they were looking for an intuitive web-based CMS for their staff and volunteers who have a diverse range of skillsets.

Collection Data Migration from PastPerfect

It is common for museums to have existing digital records when they come to eHive. We have a lot of experience in migrating this collection data into eHive. This is important to get the new system up and running as soon as possible.

The first step is to export all the records from PastPerfect for analysis. This is a free and confidential service towards a quote. This analysis matches the fields in the PastPerfect data with those in eHive. Our migration experts work through any necessary data cleanup. For example, text notes from two fields could be combined into a new single display field, or a list of terms used in a field could be reviewed before the transfer. This gives us a timeline and fixed cost for the data migration work.

In the case of the Howick Historical Village, there were 8,517 records successfully migrated from Past Perfect.

You can visit this collection on eHive here or the Howick Historical Village website here.

In December 2017 we announced the Project Ark: Digitising Southland’s heritage collections in a blog post.

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

We are happy to now release the Cataloguing Standards for Project Ark and eHive.

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.

The Cataloguing Standards for Project Ark and eHive sets out standards for cataloguing museum the objects from individual museums to ensure a consistent regional approach for museum collections.

The document outlines how to create and save objects in eHive followed by guidelines specific for History records, Archaeology, Archives, Art, Library, Natural Sciences and Photography & Multimedia.

This is followed by a section on Ongoing Collection Management Fields, covering topics such as loans in and out, exhibition history, deaccessioning, treatment and copyright.

Welcome to a new way to explore eHive! The eHive.com home page has been revamped and there are extended options for searching for objects on the public website.

Explore eHive records through the Recently Added Objects, Popular Objects, and Catalogue Type lists, or views records through our links on the most popular Object Types.

From the count next to each Object Type, we can see that there are more photographs than any other medium.

You can use the search box to look for any objects recorded in eHive, which now includes over 1 million objects. At the time of writing, there are 3,571 boats, 172 bras and 12,477 records to do with brass bands.

When you’re on the search results page you can refine your search even further with different facets. You will find a range of facets (or filters) on the left side of the page.

These filters give a whole new dimension to searching eHive. You could restrict your search to only records with images, or only the records related to a particular maker. You could refine your search for plants so that your results only showed you records of Object Type photograph or fossil.

Once a single record has been selected, then you will see high resolution copies for some images using pan and zoom options added earlier this year.

You can read more about this new way of treating images here.

How to get your records ready for Faceted Search

This new faceted search functionality may have you revisiting your records to see how they will be affected.

The search box will search all text in the object record, so you do not have to move terms to specific fields for them to be searched.

You may want to see what other terms might make your objects easier to find or more relevant to the visitor. You may want to add Object Type, Maker, Subject and Association Keyword, Images and Documents to your records to give better access to your collection.

You can also add tags to your object records. Find out more about how to add tags and comments .

We’re now working on extending the search facets options into the logged in application (my.ehive.com) for eHive account holders to make use of. This will be available in December 2019.

Improved image storage and viewing tools

eHive has added some new features for images. You can now upload larger images and have tools to pan and zoom into the detail. You can still include multiple images in a record and define the square crop thumbnail.

Here’s an example of a cameo lamp with a publicly accessible high resolution image:
https://ehive.com/collections/6335/objects/991404/cameo-lamp-carved-into-a-red-helmet-conch-shell

In the background we have been working to offer more options to host large images. To meet best practice we have employed the International Image Interoperability Framework (or ‘triple I – F’ as it’s commonly known) to make this happen. You can find out more about IIIF here and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

What is changing

Support for larger images

You can now upload larger images to eHive and then view them in greater detail. In the past you had the option to store original images, but the image could only be viewed in eHive at a maximum of 800 x 800 pixels.

Original images are ALWAYS retained and these use up your eHive storage allocation

You can upload images up to 20 MB (we will be reviewing this image size restriction with a plan to increase this) and you have the ability to view them at their full size within eHive.

However, we have simplified the way we store images and calculated your account storage use. The image you upload is now always kept and will use up storage space according to the image size. You MUST resize images down to the size you wish to store in eHive otherwise you will end up using up your storage allocation more quickly. We encourage you to store larger images as this will provide better access to your collection team, and also to public visitors as well if you choose to.

Controlling the image size public visitors have access to

You’ll have access to the original image when you’re signed in, and you can choose what size images that the public viewers have access to. You can restrict the public view of your images to the current 800 x 800 pixels display maximum (as you do know), or  (depending on the copyright licence) you can provide higher resolution images.

By default eHive will ONLY provide access to the original size image on images marked as No Copyright Restrictions (public domain). You can choose to allow access to the original image for other licences. You can review and change these settings when you’re logged in. Go to Account Settings > Preferences and Data Access. Read more about this in our help topic on Internal Account Settings.

Image size

You can still choose the image size that is displayed on eHive. This is also aligned to the Public Access Settings by default.

If a record is classified as All Rights Reserved then the default public view of the associated images will be 800 x 800 pixels.

If the record is classified as No Copyright Restrictions then the largest available image will be displayed publically with pan and zoom functionality.

These default settings can then be customised by the record or by the individual image.

Upload small image = Display small image

Upload large image = Display large image

Upload large image = Display small image

Any questions?

We have recalculated the amount of storage used by individual eHive accounts to March 2019 levels. If you have to this date chosen to store original images in your eHive account you will now have access to these larger size images in eHive with exactly the same storage use as before.

eHive will no longer automatically resize images at a maximum of 800 x 800 pixels. If you wish you conserve the storage of your eHive account by only uploading smaller images you will have to resize these images before uploading them to eHive. This blog post offers some advise on resizing images.

If you have any questions please contact us and we will be happy to talk with you.