eHive

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
Sign up
  • What is eHive?
    • Take a Tour
    • Importing Data Into eHive
    • Protect Your Data
    • Comply with Standards
    • Join a Community
    • Do More With Your Data
    • eHive Policies
      • Terms and Conditions
      • Payment and Refund Policy
      • Copyright Claims
    • Technical Specifications
    • Common Questions
  • Pricing
  • News
    • Articles
    • Newsletter
  • About
    • Roadmap
    • Release History
    • Our History
    • Contact Us
  • Help
  • Explore eHive»

April 23, 2020 By Vernon Systems

Howick Historical Village – Migrating from PastPerfect to eHive

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.

Aerial photograph of the Howick Historical Village
Aerial photograph of the Howick Historical Village

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.

Villager in Puhi Nui Kitchen
Villager in Puhi Nui Kitchen

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.

An aeroplane on Howick beach, c1930
An aeroplane on Howick beach, c1930

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.

Filed Under: Articles

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

About

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.
Vernon Systems Ltd © 2025
  • Contact Us
  • Developers
  • eHive Forum
  • eHive Policies
  • Help
  • News
  • Facebook

Copyright © 2025 · eHive Info on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in