The Buzz eHive Newsletter #19

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.