In the latest eHive upgrade we’ve added a Valuations tab to the eHive create screens.  This allows you to record one or more valuations for your objects, and keep track of valuation changes over time.

Valuation information is not publicly accessible – it can only be viewed when you are logged in and viewing your own objects.

For more information, check out the Valuations topic on the eHive wiki.

This latest upgrade also includes some improvements to the speed of eHive.  You may notice faster loading times when you are creating new records, particularly when you’re moving between tabs or saving.

A minor update to eHive was performed on 11th January 2011.

It included an enhancement to allow for searching on words with diacritics (accented characters) with or without the diacritics. For example, you can now search for accounts with the word “Tamaki” and eHive will find the gallery “” as a possible match.

http://ehive.com/esearch/account?q=Tamaki

The upgrade also includes two fixes:

• Edit My Profile – Public Profile – error saving if the latitude and longitude fields were empty
• Download PDF report – Label Report – the line between the header and the content sometimes overlapped the first record

We’ve been building in support for each account public profile page (museum directory page) to have an embedded Google Map showing their physical address. Today’s upgrade includes the bulk of the changes to support this. When you’re logged in, you can now go to Edit My Profile – Public Profile, and set a map location. This can be done by clicking the Geocode button (which gets the location from Google based on your public physical address) or by manually pasting in a latitude and longitude.

The new map appears on the account public profile page on eHive and NZMuseums.

This upgrade also includes:

• Create screen – “Save as Draft” button renamed to “Save Draft” to make it clearer that this does not create a copy of the draft, but is just updating the draft you have open
• Fixed a bug where some system emails were not being sent

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 new pick list list terms were not always indexed correctly

The Royal Logistic Corps Museum tells the story of logistical support to the British Army from the time of Oliver Cromwell to the present. Visitors can examine how over the last 500 years the soldier has been transported, fed, supplied with arms and equipment and kept in touch with loved ones. Exhibits include weapons, uniforms, medals and equipment relevant to the RLC (formed 1993) and its predecessors, whose collections are also held. These include the Royal Army Service Corps, Royal Corps of Transport, the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, the Royal Pioneer Corps, the Army Catering Corps and the Postal and Courier Service (Royal Engineers).

Go to Royal Logistic Corps Museum Collection »

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.

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 box in the header to allow searching from any page, and new RSS and Share buttons.

You can view the site at www.nzmuseums.co.nz.

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 as Creative Commons. Less restrictive licences allow for others to share and build upon the content. For example, some projects gather content into geographic or thematic repositories (such as the DigitalNZ repository for New Zealand cultural content), while others build new tools such as maps and timelines to browse the content. For social history collections of physical objects, you own the copyright to the cataloguing record and any photos you make of them. For other collections, particularly library and art collections, the copyright to the work may be held by someone else and you need to obtain permission from the copyright holder for use of the image on the web and assign a licence to the records that the copyright holder agrees with.

How it works

Account holders in eHive can set a default licence through Edit My Profile – Preferences and Data Access.

The default licence can be overridden on each individual record. There’s a new link when you’re logged in and are viewing a record: Update Copyright Licence. Here’s how it looks when updating the licence for an individual record.

There are a range of licences supported, from the least restrictive (No rights reserved), through various licences to encourage sharing (Creative Commons), up to the most restrictive (All rights reserved).

When anyone is viewing a record, they see a licence at the bottom of the page:

The link takes the visitor to details about the licence, with the Creative Commons licences linking through to the appropriate licence on creativecommons.org. The Creative Commons licences are sensitive to the country of the account holder, so if the museum is in Australia for example, the link is to the Australian version of the Creative Commons licence.

You can see an example of this on Commemorative Loving Cup record.

There is also a new option to enable or disable whether your public content can appear in searches on 3rd party sites. The rights licences and 3rd party search option are in anticipation of the programming interfaces we are currently building. At present there is no automated sharing of content, but this will opened up in the next few months. We putting these options in the system now so that account holders have plenty of time to set preferences they are comfortable with.

We’re working on new options to search for content by licence type to make it easy for users to find content they can re-use.

Other changes in this upgrade

The logged in home page now includes a new notices section. When there is a major change in eHive that we want to draw your attention to, a short description of the change will appear in the notices section at the top of the page. Each notice has dismiss and read more options.

This upgrade also includes changes to speed up page loading, with the next results page loaded in the background while you’re viewing the current page. We’ve also made some changes to support the NZMuseums website upgrade which will launch in June.

The National Philatelic Collection is a unique repository of philately and artworks relating to the design of Australian postage stamps. The collection presents the background story to stamp issues through items such as source photographs and artwork illustrating the development stages of the stamp design to printed proofs of the finished stamp.

The collection is a source of information not only to philatelists, but also to those interested in the history of graphic design and printing in Australia. It tells the story of events and personalities that shaped contemporary Australia, reflecting and documenting the development of national identity.

Go to Australia Post National Philatelic Collection »

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 now the option to select a term from the Edit Pick List screen for use in the current record.