Join over 900 Partner Institutions from around Australia

Trove brings together amazing collections from Australian libraries, universities, museums, galleries, and archives. It’s free and available online all day, every day. It is a collaboration between the National Library of Australia and hundreds of Partner organisations around Australia.

Thanks to Commonwealth government funding, Trove Collaborative Services is offering a free trial to Australian galleries, archives, museums, and historical societies that would like to reach this vast audience and benefit from seeing their collection in a national context.

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33 collections on eHive contribute their data to Trove

Setting up your eHive account to contribute to Trove is an easy process. Contact us at eHive and we can outline the steps.

The Trove community shares a common goal – to build a rich and diverse digital cultural collection for all Australians.  

Trove is visited by users over 50,000 times a day. Over 900 Partner Institutions from around Australia contribute their collections to Trove, making it the best place for cultural organisations to share their stories, connect with their audiences and grow together.

If eHive members sign up for a trial with Trove before 1 June 2022, they will not have to pay the joining fees.

You can discontinue with your Trove service partnership at any point.

To make the most of the trial they suggest organisations join early. Organisations that sign up for the trial will be able to experience many benefits, including automated ‘direct to Trove’ data loading and insights into how your collection is being used. 

The big question is, do you want to reach this vast audience and benefit from seeing your collection in a national context. 

By enabling Trove to capture data and information about the items you hold, you can reach new audiences and contribute to the Australian digital cultural heritage collection.

Here is a link to sign up and find out more about this offer to join Trove without sign up fees.

Promote your collection through Trove.

The desire behind Search for the Stars will be shared by many museums: to transfer all object records from handwritten index cards into a digital catalogue that can be shared online.

With the Search for the Stars project, the Museum of East Anglian Life, with funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund and the Headley Trust, started moving their files over onto eHive at the beginning of 2018.

“Clearly this work should be a priority for museums in the 21st century. While digitisation is not a panacea, it should be considered a baseline offer. It makes it possible for more people to globally engage with a collection should they wish to do so.”

The Museum of East Anglian Life is a collection of over 35,000 objects, as well as photographs, books, and ephemera. These items help tell the stories of life in the market towns and surrounding East Anglian countryside as well as the impact of manufacturing and different forms of transport.

The project makes use of an assembly line process – breaking digitisation down into simple tasks which can be completed with minimal skills.

As an ACE National Portfolio Organisation, involving more people with the collection is a key priority. In the three years the project has been running, the Museum of East Anglian Life has been able to transfer over 30,000 records to eHive and engage with over 400 remote volunteers across the world.

Before the first Covid lockdown they had a fairly constant 15–30 active volunteers jointly working on approximately 500 records each month. In May 2020 over 100 volunteers processed an enormous 5,000 records.

Digitisation also simplifies internal practices and empowers staff across the organisation to engage with the collection rather than being reliant on the memory of one or two ‘collections gurus’. Good data makes it much easier to manage the collection, keep it secure and consider disposal of objects – without knowing what you have, how can you make good decisions about it?

As the majority of the collection is digitised the Museum of East Anglian Life have put together a sort of how-to-guide for how a small museum has accomplished almost complete digitisation.

eHive collection profile

Collection Description:

The web-based Health Museum is the first stage towards developing a physical museum. It is designed to showcase health objects and collections held within South Australia, initially focusing on the institutions within Central Adelaide Local Health Network: Royal Adelaide Hospital, The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, SA Dental, SA Pathology and Hampstead Rehabilitation Centre.

Visit the collection

Object of Interest:

Name/Title
Equipment: Corporal Coles Prosthetic Hand

About this object
Whale bone prosthetic hand.

Corporal John Coles, Miner and Sapper, was injured in a parade ground accident. In 1842, while preparing for the second firing of a cannon in a celebratory salute in honour of the birth of the Duke of Cornwall, the gunpowder exploded early and Corporal Coles lost the fingers of his right hand except the thumb, and the top of his left hand forefinger. Colonial Surgeon, James Nash, performed minimal amputation of the damaged areas as Corporal Coles was concerned to not have his entire hand amputated.

Robert Hasting Norman, Surgeon Dentist, arrived in Adelaide in 1844, establishing the colony’s first dental practice in Wright Street. A learned gentleman, Robert Norman also carved objects from ivory and bone, exploring mechanical applications with his craft. Governor Grey sponsored the construction of a prosthetic hand by Robert Norman for John Coles. An engraved silver plaque, ‘Presented by His Excellency Governor Grey – Robert Norman Inventor’, is attached to the prosthetic hand. The plaque does not impede on the functionality of the hand. John Coles used the prosthetic hand until his death 1886. Made out of whalebone, it has four fingers and is operated using strings and pulleys. The fingers are flexed by contracting the strings which are connected to a ring on the remaining thumb.

The prosthetic hand was reported as being made from ‘sea-cow’, intricately carved to copy details of fingers and nails. The catgut pulleys were interlinked with small spools, carefully worked into the knuckle joints, manouvered by the limited lateral mobility of the only remaining digit, the right thumb, over which a ring was placed which attached to the pulleys. The prosthetic hand was described as ‘beautiful in its mechanism and accurate in its working that Corporal Coles could pick up a button or a sixpence with pleasing facility’.

Donated by Mr DW Jordan, Adelaide

Subject and Association Description
Born in North Devon, England in 1814, John Coles at age 23 joined the British regiment Corps. Sappers and Miners. In 1837 he volunteered to join an exploration party of five men, led by Captain George Grey, to sail to Australia and explore the north-west and west coast of Western Australia. Journals written by George Grey detail the many hardships and experiences of the exploration party over the next two years. Captain Grey held Corporal Coles in high esteem and referred to him as ‘my faithful and tried companion in all my wanderings’.

The newly appointed Surveyor-General for South Australia, E.C. Frome and family sailed into Pt Adelaide in September 1839. They were accompanied by a party of Sappers, including Corporal Coles, to make headway in the survey of the large areas of land in the new colony.
Corporal Coles also joined the support party of Edward John Ayres on his exploration of northern South Australia in 1840 and 1841.

Captain Grey had returned to England in 1840 before travelling back to Adelaide in May 1841, within the next year Captain Grey succeeded Governor Gawler, becoming the third Governor of South Australia.

Object Type
Equipment

Object number
AR#1723

Copyright Licence  
All rights reserved

In April 2021, our eHive team member Leisa Taylor worked with Te Hikoi museum to help catalogue their collection in eHive with Project Ark. Some of these objects include a victorian penguin feather muff and collar, the hatbox of Minnie Deans, the first English bible printed in Scotland, and a range of other treasures.

Although the week sped by very quickly, Leisa had a few cataloguing tips she could share with the team.

1. Customise your spellcheck

Most internet browsers have a spell checker. You can add words to the dictionary (by right clicking) or change the spellchecker dictionary to another language (for example, from US English to UK English).

To change your Google Chrome spellchecker dictionary:

1. Click on three dot menu and choose Settings
2. Choose Advanced from the menu and then choose Languages
3. You can change between US and UK English by using the slider buttons
4. You can also click on the expand arrow to add another dictionary in a different language.

You can also change your spellchecker in Mozilla Firefox.

2. Save time with your keyboard

When you catalogue in eHive, you have to scroll all the way to the top to get to the next tab. This lets you double check the fields, but it can also snap you out of the cataloguing flow. Here are a few keys to help with this.

3. Find records you edited

You can search for records you have catalogued in a day, week, month, or for all time. Each record will need to have you as the cataloguer and the date you catalogued the record.

In our examples, Anna is our cataloguer. Change her name for yours to make any of these searches work when logged into eHive.

All of your catalogued records

To find all the records where Anna is the cataloguer, enter:

cataloguer: Anna

A year’s worth of catalogued records

To find all the records Anna catalogued in 2019, enter:

cataloguer:Anna AND catalogued_date: *2019

This will work if you always write the full year, e.g. 20.5.2019 not 20.5.19.

Catalogued records for a set time period

To find all the records Anna catalogued in a week, enter:

cataloguer: anna AND catalogued_date: [23.05.2021 TO 29.05.2021]

This will find everything catalogued by Anna between two dates (23.5.2021 – 29.05.2021).

If your dates have been recorded in different ways (e.g. some records have 23.5.2021, others 23/5/21, other 23 May 2021), eHive will only find records that match what you typed in search.

4. Have a set of standard terms

Standards help make sure you don’t miss an important field when cataloguing. They also make sure there is consistency between your records which improves searching. You could find all of Anna’s catalogued records (from the searching example above) because the dates are consistently in the same format. 

We recommend having a look at the Project Ark standards for cataloguing in eHive. Leisa used these standards to catalogue a series of shell necklaces and a set of straight razors while at Te Hikoi museum.

You can take these and use them as is, or customise them to fit your own collection better. Date fields and pick lists (locations) are two places where having standards makes it easier to search.

5. Flag that more work needs doing

A cataloguer’s work is never done! Here are some fields you can use to flag that future work/investigation needs to be done.

Record status

You can use this field to note if an object is accessioned (part of your collection) or deaccessioned (no longer part of your collection).

You can also use this field to note if the record is skeletal, fully catalogued, more research required, or awaiting approval. This can be a good place to mark if something requires checking before publishing, or if is fully catalogued.

Restriction type

You can use this field to note if there are any restrictions on an object. This could flag that a record is not finished and can’t be published, e.g. “Private – requires approval”, “Private – requires more information”. You can also note if something is hazardous, culturally sensitive, or contains sensitive information.

General flag

You can use this field to mark a wide range of issues, next steps, or which stage the record is in. Some sites use this to note if an image needs to be replaced or uploaded.

Comments

You can use the comments field to explain why an object isn’t ready for publication, to flag what research is still to be done, or what work is next to do. You can add a date to this comment, so you can have a history of issues on the object, and you can add a comments person, so you can flag who requested these changes, or who is to do the work, or note that you made these comments.

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.