NZMuseums.co.nz is a website brought about by National Services Te Paerangi (which forms a part of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington) in partnership with Vernon Systems Ltd. It features a directory of 400 New Zealand museums and galleries, who also have the opportunity to catalogue and contribute their collection items online. This is the first step in showcasing collections online for the majority of participants. Because the NZMuseums site is built utilising eHive as its foundation, the content that is on the site is also present within eHive as our very first community.

Go to the NZMuseums community »

Over the last month we have gone through several technical upgrades to the eHive site, upgrading the operating system, application server and Java version. These changes will give us a good foundation for the planned enhancements in the coming year.

The latest upgrade to eHive included:

• Bug fixes for the application we use internally to bulk load data into the eHive website
• Bug fix for image derivative creation which was not running in some cases. This was caused by the upgrade to Java 1.6 earlier in the month.
• Social booking button added to the object, account and community pages to make it easy to share links on social networking sites to pages you like on eHive

There was a minor upgrade of eHive on 28th October 2009 which included:

– New Explore page Most Interesting Objects

This page ranks object records on eHive by several factors, including the amount of text information, the number of images of the object, the number of comments and tags and the number of views of the page.

– Underlying changes to support the NZMuseums search widget. We’ll be able to show you the widget in the next week or so!

– Bug fixes. Two bugs were fixed in this release. Deleted objects that were restored from the Recycle Bin were not appearing in public searches and in some combinations users were getting a server error on publishing an object record.

The upcoming August update includes a major upgrade of eHive functionality, both behind the scenes and for eHive users.

Exporting enhancements

Currently, exporting records is in XML format only. We are finalising work on further exporting formats, including exporting public, core or full record details in comma separated values format (CSV) for use in other applications.

This means you could easily import your records into Open Office for example. We’re also adding export options for the same subsets of fields in Microsoft Excel format.

Acquisition Records

The development of separate Acquisition Records allows you to track common acquisition information for one or more objects in a single acquisition record and to track acquisitions before they are approved.

The acquisition record includes the source of the acquisition, the method by which it came into the collection, notes, date, a description of the whole acquisition, price and valuation. Acquisition records can be created before the cataloguing of the individual objects if necessary, and be linked to one or more object records that share the same acquisition information at any time.

Standard Reports

Our first new standard reports are being released this August. The first two add to the functionality of administrating communities:

Community Administration Reports

• Summary report – easily review the total of pending, approved and declined members for your community. You can also view the total number of published object records contributed to date.

• Download a list of approved members for your community.

Additional standard object based reports are planned to cover basic collections management functions. In the next release after August we will be adding entry receipts (based on the Acquisition Record information) and exhibition labels.

Search Friendly URLs

The web address structure within eHive is getting a serious reworking.

As an example, the current object page addresses look like:
http://ehive.com/index.php?option=com_ehive&task=showDetail&recordIdSet=2406

In the August release we’ll be changing to a more human readable format. For example, the above URL will probably change to:
http://ehive.com/object/2406
(we’re just finalising how accounts and objects will fit within the URL)

The changes to the address style has a few benefits:
• More readable for users
• Better indexing by search engines
• Easier editing of the addresses to get to other content (e.g. open the page for a specific record by typing in the URL).

The changes are also laying the groundwork for our future public application programming interfaces (APIs). We’ll be adding code to redirect links to the old style addresses to the new addresses.

South Georgia is a sub Antarctic island rich in natural, social and political history. It is located in the South Atlantic Ocean, near the Falkland Islands, and welcomes thousands of visitors annually. South Georgia Museum is situated in the Villa of an old whaling station in Grytviken, and houses artefacts of the whaling and sealing industries, Antarctic Explorer Ernest Shackleton, and natural and military history. South Georgia was partly the scene of the Falklands War in 1982, and is now home to two British Antarctic Research Stations.

Go to South Georgia Museum »

28 April 2009

Paul Rowe (Vernon Systems) and Pamela Lovis (Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) spoke about NZMuseums and eHive at the annual Museums and the Web conference. This year the conference was in Indianapolis.

The conference attracts hundreds of museum technology experts from around the world, showcasing new internet related development in the museum community and with discussions on a range of issues facing museums on the web.

The conference presentation is now available on Slideshare

Today’s update to the site included some major additions:

Sign up for an account

After running a closed beta on the site over the first part of the year, we’re now ready to open it up for all interested users. You can now sign up through the link on the top right.

New Administrator Options for Communities

Any communities can now have an additional approval step before an account can join the community. The community administrator can view lists of pending, approved and declined members and change the membership status of selected users in bulk. Pending members will receive an email to let them know their application to join a community is waiting for approval.

Sundry Minor Fixes and Enhancements

You can now jump back to your home page by clicking on your username in the top header whenever you’re logged in.

The eHive logo is also now a shortcut to the home page.

My Latest Objects now includes objects that do not yet have an image. A placeholder image appears for these.

NZMuseums – Integration with NZLive.com

NZMuseums.co.nz has had a major addition with the integration of national event information from NZLive.com. From the Search – What’s On page you can now search on events happening at museums all over New Zealand. We’re also adding links to the events at a particular museum from the museum profile pages.

The Waitangi Treaty Grounds are the historical site of the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi); New Zealand’s founding document. The 506 hectare site was gifted to New Zealand in trust by Lord and Lady Bledisloe in 1932 and is now home to numerous artefacts of key historical significance, as well as being a vibrant and active historical site. Their collections comprise Māori and Pākehā historical artefacts, archives and art.

Go to Waitangi National Trust »

A minor update to eHive was performed on 31 March 2009.

It included:

• New short aliases for common fields to save typing when searching. You can read about search aliases in the Help Topic –http://en.wiki.ehive.com/wiki/Searching#Internal_field_names
• Payment screen now live for account purchases and renewals