The latest eHive upgrade supports sorting of complex object numbers. eHive now stores the original object number entered and a formatted version which is used for sorting. You’ll see the new sort option on the search result page under Sort Records. This upgrade also includes: Sorting of draft records you have created by the date created A reduced indexing stop word list to include some two letter prefixes used by organisations in their object numbers A fix for bug where
25th June 2010 – Pick list maintenance enhancements
A new pick list editor was added in the latest upgrade. You can now edit the names of existing terms or delete unused ones. There’s also a handy link showing the number of records using any particular term. You can click on the link to open a new tab with a results lists of all the records.
If you love your content, set it free
Mike Ellis, a social web specialist based in the UK, posted an excellent presentation on why setting your content free is a good thing. You can read the presentation here.
NZMuseums developments – June 2010
The last two months has been a busy time for the web development team. One of the projects has been the redevelopment of the NZMuseums website. McGovern Online have updated the branding of the site and this has flowed through to all pages. The home page has also had a major overhaul. The changes include a new interactive map to find museums, display of the latest tweets from the NZMuseum Twitter stream, latest tags on the home page, a search
28th May 2010 Upgrade – Rights Management/Creative Commons
Our latest upgrade includes rights management support. You can now set a default licence for your content and override the licence on any specific record and its images. The licences you can choose from include Creative Commons to promote sharing and re-use of content. By default, all content has been set with a licence of ‘All rights reserved’. However, we’d love for organisations who hold the copyright to some or all of their content to choose less restrictive licences such
22 March 2010 Update
The first phase of a large batch of changes on NZMuseums has been completed. We’ve added search friendly website addresses, WordPress integration for the News section, new image zoom functions and a batch of other changes. You can read about it in full on the NZMuseums website. We’ve also fine-tuned how the pick list functions work over the last couple of weeks. You can now type into any pick list field and the possible matches will be presented. There’s also
11th February 2010
Square cropping of images is now common on many cultural websites. It allows users to browse small arrays of images which make the most use of the available pixels, however it is hard to have generic cropping rules that work for all images. The latest eHive update has added new options for the square cropping of images. The default square cropping for portrait images has been changed to keep the top of the image. By looking through our existing portrait
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
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!
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
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
Museums and the Web 2009 Conference Presentation
28 April 2009 Paul Rowe (Vernon Systems) and Pamela Lovis (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) spoke about NZMuseums and eHive at the annual Museums and the Web conference. This year the conference was in Indianapolis. The conference attracts hundreds of museum technology experts from around the world, showcasing new internet related development in the museum community and with discussions on a range of issues facing museums on the web. The conference presentation is now available on Slideshare
