We’re very proud to announce the introduction of native support for audio and video files on your eHive catalogue records. You can now upload audio and video files in the same way you would upload images and PDF files, with the same granular suite of controls you’re familiar with.

Audio and video files contribute to your data storage so we’ve updated the way you view your data usage to make it easy to see how your data allowance is being used. We also have a new Help section to guide you through this new feature, available here: Audio and video file help

Click to watch the video overview below.

Our Drop-in sessions have moved to quarterly this year. We had our first session back in March which was well attended with a lot of discussion with the community members.

The next session is coming up in June so keep an eye out in your inbox for an invite to join us in the coming weeks. We’d love to see you there!

Work is always continuing behind the scenes for the eHive team. Since our last newsletter we’re excited to have introduced the following features:

1. Introduction of audio and video file support as outlined above.
2. We’ve extended our use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Web Application Firewall (WAF) to try and ward off unwanted traffic to the eHive site.
3. We’ve swapped over the provider we use for our payment gateway. Support for our previous provider by our banking partners ended, so we have moved to using Stripe to process all payments online. This has enabled us to support more credit card providers.
4. We have introduced a new bulk import tool for eHive staff to use when we perform bulk imports for you. Technology changes meant our previous tool became obsolete so we have written a new tool from scratch keeping us up to speed and able to process your bulk imports and data migration.
5. We have also introduced two new tools for our use as system administrators. We now have the ability to bulk empty the recycle bin for an account on behalf of a client, as well as delete unverified accounts. Deleting unverified accounts helps us combat the creation of spam accounts on eHive.

After a request from within the eHive community, we’ve recently made the Style and iconography field searchable. As with all of our fields, specific field help is available here: eHive field help

You can see specific help for how to search on the Style and iconography field here: Style and iconography help

For help on how to construct searches, please click the button below

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:

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.