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You are here: Home / Archives for Newsletter

September 25, 2024 By Vernon Systems

The Buzz eHive Newsletter #19

Subscribe to THE BUZZ

Welcome to THE BUZZ where we highlight new features and news from the eHive community.


eHive passes its 2 millionth object


Every record catalogued on eHive gets a unique number in the eHive database, and we recently passed 2 million items catalogued. As so many of the items you catalogue are private, the first publicly available record beyond 2 million is ‘HERSTORY’ a diary from 1983 held by the Charlotte Museum Te Whare Takatāpui-Wāhine o Aotearoa

This record was catalogued as part of the NZ Maritime Museum’s Digi-Hub project while they were working with the team at the Charlotte Museum Te Whare Takatāpui-Wāhine o Aotearoa. You can learn more about this project by watching the video below:

Click to read more about HERSTORY

eHive Drop-in Sessions


Coffee in a white cup

Join us for our October Drop-in sessions free of charge on Zoom. Choose your time zone, we’re running the same session on NZ time, and then a week later at a UK, Africa and Middle-East friendly time.

We’ve been having great conversations with our community members who have joined us, helping us showcase work we’ve been doing and providing feedback on ideas we’re proposing. We would love to see you join us. Click the links below to register for the next sessions on October 8th (NZ time) and October 17th (UK/Africa/Middle East time).

Click to Register for NZ Drop-in Session
Click to Register for UK/Africa/Middle-East Drop-in Session

eHive Product Updates


It’s been a huge few months for the eHive team with a recent release that’s brought a number of changes as outlined below:

  1. We’ve improved the Recycle bin – Admin users can now click on any deleted record to see its object detail page, with further shortcuts to restore or permanently delete the record.
  2. We’ve made changes to how an account’s Plan and Usage appear to make it clearer to understand (new Settings > Account status section)
  3. We’ve done some tidying up of the user interface for how numbers are formatted and how social media links appear
  4. We’ve updated Analytics to reflect stats being available from 16 Nov, 2022 now Google Analytics has completely retired its earlier version.
  5. When you Create similar object, it now creates the summary heading for the draft object record.
  6. We’ve repaired some tools which monitor draft object records and the process for removing draft records which have no fields is now fixed.

New Natural History fields made public


Icon of a bug

After consultation with the eHive community, we’ve recently made a number of Natural History fields public. This supports enhanced visibility of information useful to researchers. The fields are:

  • Specimen age
  • Sex
  • Geological age
  • Geological age description
  • Geological formation
  • Geological formation description
  • Stratigraphy description
  • Stratigraphy keyword

You can see an example of how this looks on the record below from the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History

Click to see about crayfish

eHive spam accounts


We’ve been working really hard recently on trying to minimise the impact and visibility of spam and unwanted visitors to the eHive site. As well as the recent web security updates we introduced mentioned in our last newsletter we have now also made two further changes.

We’ve completed a full review of all public eHive accounts deleting any spam accounts we have found. We have updated our terms when you sign up to create an eHive account to reflect our rights to do this. We now undertake regular review of all new accounts.

We’ve also introduced a restriction where you cannot use full stops and slash characters in your account name and short name as these can be used to create a web address. Preventing web addresses being part of an account name decreases the value spam accounts on eHive offer to unwanted users.


Feature Collection: Benalla Art Gallery


Image of exterior of Benalla Art Gallery at dusk

The Benalla Art Gallery Collection includes painting, printmaking, works on paper, photography, textiles, ceramics, sculpture and decorative arts spanning three centuries of Australian art. The Ledger Collection focuses on Australian art from the 19th and early 20th centuries with an emphasis on the colonial and impressionist periods. The collection continues to develop with recent acquisitions including outstanding Indigenous and contemporary Australian artworks.

Benalla Art Gallery also use eHive’s WordPress plugins to bring their collections through onto their own website.

Visit Benalla Art Gallery on eHive
Visit Benalla Art Gallery’s Collections site

Object of Interest:

Name/Title
Rattlesnake blues

About this object

Rattlesnake blues is a pigment print on photo rag paper by Petrina Hicks. The photograph was made in 2016 and purchased by Benalla Art Gallery with funds from The Robert Salzer Foundation and Benalla Art Gallery Trust Fund, 2017 © Courtesy of the artist via Michael Reid, Sydney and Berlin.

Photograph entitled "Rattlesnake blues" featuring a young girl in blue clothing holding the skeleton of a rattlesnake in a position where it would attack her face.
Read more

Filed Under: Newsletter

August 29, 2024 By Vernon Systems

eHive’s new web security changes

Welcome to this special update on recent changes to eHive’s web security in response to recent outages.

Dear eHive users,

Thank you for being valued members of the eHive community and for your continued support of eHive. In this special edition of our newsletter, we would like to address recent issues with site performance and reliability. We’ll discuss what happened, why it happened and what we’ve done to address the issues at hand.

Summary

We have seen a huge increase in the number of eHive pages viewed by automated processes (bots) and in some cases the number of requests was so large that it has affected the performance of the website. On 28 August, we added a new layer of protection – Amazon’s Web Application Firewall – into the system to help us block these unwanted requests and get eHive running smoothly again. eHive is currently stable and working as expected.

What happened?

During late July and August we saw a few large spikes in internet traffic pointing at ehive.com. Traffic simply means how many times a computer tries to reach a page on eHive. When you go to the site or execute a search, you’re creating a tiny bit of traffic to the site. The spikes we saw during July involved hundreds of thousands of requests in a very short time period, many of which were complex searches for large sets of records. This caused the site to run slower and to be offline for brief periods (something we call an ‘outage’). We were able to address these issues by restarting a few services behind the scenes.

On 1 August, we received a spike in internet traffic significant enough to cause eHive to go offline for users. This spike was the biggest we had seen to date by some margin. Our development team worked on this and blocked a large number of IP addresses which were the origin of the increased traffic. At this point we came up with plan for how we want to address this issue moving forward.

On 27 and 28 August, we received an even larger spike in internet traffic causing eHive to go offline. Once back online, we experienced unreliable performance and further smaller outages. This outage occurred before we were able to execute the plan we had designed following the 1 August incident.

Why is this happening?

The nature of the internet is changing. Over the past twelve months the type of internet traffic all websites are receiving is altering. Current estimates are that only half of the traffic to an internet site is from genuine users (in our case, genuine researchers interested in your collections). The rest of the traffic is generally from something we call bots.

There are good bots and bad bots. The most obvious example of a good bot is the one Google use to index eHive. This allows them to know what content eHive has, and then show it to people searching on Google. Without it, people wouldn’t find your records. Similar bots exist for other search engines like Microsoft’s Bing and for other technologies that we like and are beneficial to us.

Bad bots are one of the internet’s current biggest issues. It’s difficult to tell in many cases what they’re being used for, but one example might be someone who wants to look at your website, scrape its information in bulk and use it to train their language models for an AI project. Typically a bad bot makes such a huge request for information from a website it creates a massive spike in traffic. Bad bots can also be used by people with malicious intent. The bots create such huge spikes in internet traffic to your site that its servers fail, causing your site to go offline. Such malicious attacks are referred to as Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDOS attacks), though there are other ways malicious attacks can occur.

It is not possible to determine if the eHive outages on 1 and 27-28 August were bad bots or an explicit DDOS attack.

What have we done to address the issue?

The outage which occurred on 1 August highlighted the limitations we had in blocking the number of IP addresses necessary to thwart a spike in traffic caused by bots or bad actors. During that spike, our development team had to apply rules blocking certain IP addresses access to the site, which in turn prevented their traffic and the load to decrease.

The key point here is that our team had to manually select and block these addresses. We identified that we would like to use automated technology available from Amazon Web Services (AWS) called the Amazon Web Application Firewall (WAF) to help us block bad bots and bad actors quickly and at scale. We already recently implemented this technology on Vernon Systems’ sister web product Vernon Browser to great effect.

The plan we designed following the 1 August outage was to implement the same for eHive. The Web Application Firewall is critical as it maintains a live list of IP addresses which are the origin of bad bots and bad actors on the web. The move to using these services on eHive required some time to rewrite and reconfigure some key bits of eHive’s systems behind the scenes.

The outage on 27 and 28 August happened before we were able to execute this plan. The scale of the spike in traffic was such that our previous methods of blocking IP addresses was not sustainable. The team took the decision to immediately implement the change to using AWS tools and our developers worked on this collectively long into the night. As a result the new AWS tools are in place and are preventing bad actors impacting the site. eHive is currently stable and working as expected.

Our next steps are to spend more time carefully optimising these tools for eHive, as we had originally planned to do, in a more managed and measured manner. Work is ongoing in this area and will be for a little while. However, we now have the best tools available in place and working on eHive to try and prevent these issues from happening again.

Our commitment to you as users of eHive is always to do the best we can to provide you with a stable set of tools to look after your collections. We apologise for the issues we have seen over the past little while, but we are confident we’re now on the right track to continue supporting you in your work.

Thank you again for supporting eHive.

Kindest regards,

The eHive team

Filed Under: Newsletter

July 29, 2024 By Vernon Systems

The Buzz 18

Subscribe to THE BUZZ

Welcome to THE BUZZ where we highlight new features and news from the eHive community.


Join Our Drop-in Sessions!


Coffee in a white cup

Since the end of 2023, we’ve been running bi-monthly Drop-in sessions free of charge on Zoom for our eHive users. We recently introduced the ability to choose your time for the session, running the same session on NZ time, and then a week later at a UK, Africa and Middle-East friendly time.

We’ve been having great conversations with our community members who have joined us, helping us showcase work we’ve been doing and providing feedback on ideas we’re proposing. We would love to see more of you join us. Click the links below to register for the next sessions on August 6th (NZ time) and August 13th (UK/Africa/Middle East time).

Click to Register for NZ Drop-in Session
Click to Register for UK/Africa/Middle East Drop-in Session

eHive Product Updates


There’s been an awful lot happening behind the scenes at eHive! We’ve recently switched over from Google Maps to OpenStreetMaps on your profile page – this may seem small but it paves the way to use maps more widely across the site without increased costs from Google. We’ve introduced the ability for a logged in user to change their default results view and default results sort order. More on that in these help articles here and here.

We’ve also been working on the eHive WordPress plugins, keeping them inline with a few major WordPress updates, and also introducing the ability to have pagination on the results pages feature at the top and bottom of the results view.


Your Feedback Needed!


We’re proposing a few changes to eHive we’d love your feedback on. Firstly, for Natural History records, we’ve been asked if we could make the following fields public. This makes sense to us, but as they’re currently private and some of you may have catalogued against them, we’d like your thoughts. The fields are:

‘Specimen Age’, ‘Sex’, ‘Geological Formation’, ‘Geological Age’, ‘Geological Age Description’ and ‘Stratigraphy Description.’

We’re also proposing introducing a third ‘List’ view for search results for logged in users. You’d have the option to choose which fields you saw from the list below:

‘Object number’, ‘Name/title’, ‘Maker’, ‘Production date’, ‘Object type’, ‘Current location’, ‘Specimen category’ and ‘Taxonomic classification’.

You can see an example of what that would look like on our Browser demo site. Browser is one of Vernon System’s other web products and already features a list view as seen here. You can toggle between the three views using the options on the upper right part of the screen. Please send us your thoughts to ‘info@ehive.com’ or click the button below.

Click to Send us Your Feedback

eHive Development


Our team of developers have also been very busy working on parts of eHive you can’t see. We’ve made some significant changes to the way our development environments are set up and deliver code to the site you use. Some of these changes have supported a new developer joining the team – that means more awesome features for you!

Some of the changes are around how we process portions of data and the way computing resources are used to work on them. This supports future features managing data, such as lists and batch processing.

We’ve also seen a significant increase in unwanted attempts to upset and harm the eHive system. Internet security is more important now than ever and the eHive team have been working hard to make sure bad actors are prevented from slowing down your cataloguing work.


eHive Training Workshop


A little earlier this year, Penny our Lead Technical Communicator, ran a training session for the museums in and around Marlborough, New Zealand. Penny wrote a blog post about the day. Read all about it at the link below.

Read the Blog Post

Filed Under: Newsletter

November 10, 2023 By Vernon Systems

The Buzz #17

Subscribe to THE BUZZ

Welcome to THE BUZZ where we highlight new features and news from the eHive community.


We’re introducing drop-in sessions!


Coffee in a white cup

We’re introducing bi-monthly drop-in sessions where we get to talk with you. Every two months we’ll meet on Zoom and give you a quick 5min run down of what we’ve been up to at eHive towers, and then we’ll open the floor to you. We’re keen to hear what you’ve been up to, how you’re using eHive and to have regular opportunities for you to ask us questions about the work we’re doing behind the scenes.

We make eHive to support our community of users in caring for and sharing your collections, so grab a coffee and come chat. Please register so we can send you the Zoom details. Our first drop-in session will be Friday 8th of December. We look forward to seeing you.

Click to register

eHive Product Updates


It’s been busy behind the scenes at eHive. Since our last newsletter we have made plenty of changes, many of which will have been visible to you. Firstly we’ve increased the maximum image size you can upload to 200MB per image, and we’ve also increased the size of the profile image which displays on your account profile page.

We have introduced new fields which are available under Advanced Search as well as reviewed which fields appear against which catalogue types.

The eHive WordPress plugins have received a lot of love too. We brought them inline with the latest WordPress versions, implemented image size as an option for both lightbox and list search results views, and we did some subtle changes which help the eHive search plugin.

Finally, the past few months have been a very big few months for cyber security issues globally. This has meant a significant amount of time has gone into securing eHive and your collections, responding to issues as they have arisen and applying fixes as needed.


Feature Collection: Federation Council


Federation Council logo

The Federation Council region encompasses Corowa, Howlong, Mulwala, Oaklands, Urana, Balldale, Boree Creek, Buraja-Lowesdale, Coreen, Daysdale, Morundah, Rand, Rennie and Savernake in New South Wales, Australia.

Their records include Fed Art Prize and Fed Photo Prize acquisitive works, Federation Council art collection, public artworks from their region and historical artefacts.

Visit Federation Council on eHive

Object of Interest:

Name/Title
Miki City Clock

About this object

Miki City’s 25-year Commemorative Gift to the Federation Council. A clock in the form of a dwarf azalea flower, marking the passage of time for our eternal friendship. Gifted in September 2022.

Originally the Sister City agreement was between Yokawa Town and Corowa Shire. As each changed or amalgamated over time, it became a relationship between the now Miki City and Federation Council (NSW, Australia). The relationship continues to be a great success and is currently in its 26th year. There is a program which affords High School students from the Federation Council area the opportunity to visit Japan as part of a hosted exchange program every two years. Students from Miki in Japan also visit Australia and stay with local host families. This program allows delegates to experience another culture, share knowledge and experiences, develop connections and friendships, which is an experience that cannot be underestimated in today’s global community.

Image of a clock in the form of a dwarf azalea flower. It has five points to the flower and is a rich, deep pink colour.
Read more

Filed Under: Newsletter

June 16, 2023 By Vernon Systems

The Buzz #16

Subscribe to THE BUZZ

Welcome to THE BUZZ where we highlight new features and news from the eHive community.


Kōtuia ngā Kete site launches!


The all new Kōtuia ngā Kete website has now launched. Formerly the NZ Museums community at nzmuseums.co.nz and on eHive, the new site brought to us by the National Services Te Paerangi team at Te Papa Tongarewa brings a new look and improved ways to connect Aotearoa New Zealand’s cultural collections.

Details for your organisation’s profile are still managed through your eHive account so make sure you’re up to date!

Click to visit Kotuia

eHive Product Updates


We’re continually making changes to the eHive platform to make it better for you to use. Over the past few months we’ve worked on a few key areas. Firstly, if you are a WordPress plugin user, the eHive plugins have all had an overhaul to bring them in line with some of the technology changes introduced across the WordPress environment.

We have also made a subtle change to how indexing works enabling any Object names which feature macrons to appear in the correct alphabetical order.

Finally, after many years of hinting, we have removed the old ‘eHive ID’ method of logging into eHive. This means logging in is now via email address and password only. The eHive team did a little happy dance, but if you do have any issues logging in, please get in touch with us and we’re always happy to help!


Feature Collection: Canterbury Centre for Historic Photography and Film


The Canterbury Centre for Historic Photography and Film Incorporates The Museum of Photography at Ferrymead and is based at The Ferrymead Heritage Park in Christchurch New Zealand…

The Centre is a Non-Profit Organization and their objective is the Collection and Preservation of the unique photographic heritage of New Zealand, especially of the Canterbury Region.
The museum displays a large array of antique and vintage camera and photographic equipment, plus lots of interesting images and early photograph collections.
Donations of old cameras, photographs, negatives or related items are always welcome.

Visit Canterbury Centre for Historic Photography and Film

Object of Interest:

Name/Title
Early Motor Racing Photo, Wigram Christchurch

About this object

A Bentley V8 Racing car on the starting grid for the 1957 Lady Wigram Trophy Race, Wigram Christchurch, New Zealand.

Read more

Filed Under: Newsletter

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Testimonials

New England Regional Art Museum

I’ve worked with the Team at eHive to deliver three online collection projects – across archives, library and art museum collections, both in New Zealand and Australia. The technical support is exemplary and the eHive Team have offered guidance and advice that makes solving any problems easy and maximising project potential possible. I’ve used eHive as both a host website for online collections, and for a fully integrated museum website search experience that has helped diversify our audiences and allow people to respond to collections in a tangible way.

Tanya Robinson - New Zealand & Australia

Mataura Museum

Thanks to eHive we are now a museum without walls. After putting our collection online, web visitors exceed physical visitors by a factor of ten, all without having to set up and maintain our own website. This wider reach has brought a raft of new connections to our small community museum.

David Luoni - New Zealand

Tweed Regional Museum

eHive has allowed the Tweed Regional Museum to easily publish our collection online, making it more accessible than ever before, revolutionising how we work and how far our collection can go. The back end of the system is incredibly easy to use, making it simple for staff with non technical backgrounds to publish the collection online. The team at Vernon have an excellent customer service ethos and help is never far away. We can’t recommend eHive to other small or medium museums enough.

Erika Taylor - Australia

Ashley Parker

Personally I consider eHive to be an absolute triumph. It is easy to use, logical, comprehensive, economic, safe (as in backed up), it has an open data/migration path to get data out and the support is superb. I will absolutely encourage other institutions I come across to change over to it. I did a pretty thorough analysis of the competition out there before selecting eHive and it seemed the best approach of all the choices.

Ashley Parker - Australia

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eHive is an innovative web-based system that will help you catalogue, organise and share your collection in a simple and secure way. eHive is developed by Vernon Systems.
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