Welcome

Welcome to the second issue of the EMu Newsletter for 2011, a big year for KE and EMu Users with the inaugural Global EMu User Group Meeting to be held in London in October.

In this issue you'll find an update about the Global EMu User Group Meeting, announcements about new members of the EMu family, news about functionality on the way with EMu 4.0.04, and profiles of two EMu users. You will also find information about EMu's integrated pest management (Did You Know) and a tip about how to paste a list of values into a table (Tips and Tricks).

In this issue

• EMu User Group Meetings & other news
• The EMu Community grows
• Release Info
• EMu Client Profiles
• Did You Know?
• Tips and Tricks

2011 Global EMu User Group Meeting: It's All About the Collections

Planning for the 2011 Global EMu User Group Meeting is well underway and the programme is taking shape and filling up with excellent speakers and topics. We expect to publish the first cut of the programme next week (on the EMu website and through the EMuUsers Forum), but will continue to accept paper proposals for some time, just in case you're still planning on presenting a paper.

The 2011 Global EMu User Group Meeting will be held in lieu of the North American, European and Australasian User Group Meetings. The venue is the Natural History Museum, London, on 12-14 October 2011, preceded by the Natural History Special Interest Group (NHSIG) on 11 October. The focus of the meeting is enhancing the knowledge of your institution through use of EMu, and topics will include:

• IMu – EMu’s new integrated web technology
• Capturing and managing narratives
• Integrating EMu with other corporate systems
• New technology

In addition to these themes, there will be a broad range of case studies, several clients showcasing their systems, the ever popular tours, as well as a celebration of KE Software's 25th birthday!

Tours are being planned for:

• Natural History Museum - various options
• Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives newest museum (opening soon) - M Shed
• Royal Academy of Music
• Dulwich Picture Gallery
• Oxford Museum of the History of Science

You can register your interest in attending the 2011 Global EMu UGM using our online Registration form.

Details will be announced on the EMu User Group Meetings forum as they become available, so be sure to subscribe to the forum to receive updates.

We hope to see you all in London in October!

Digital Images of Yale’s Vast Cultural Collections Now Available for Free

In May the Yale Daily Bulletin announced that digital images of Yale’s vast cultural collections were now available for free:

"Scholars, artists and other individuals around the world will enjoy free access to online images of millions of objects housed in Yale's museums, archives, and libraries thanks to a new Open Access policy that the University announced today. Yale is the first Ivy League university to make its collections accessible in this fashion, and already more than 250,000 images are available through a newly developed collective catalog.

The goal of the new policy is to make high quality digital images of Yale's vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available.

As works in these collections become digitized, the museums and libraries will make those images that are in the public domain freely accessible. In a departure from established convention, no license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use. The result is that scholars, artists, students, and citizens the world over will be able to use these collections for study, publication, teaching and inspiration."

Dr Lawrence Gall, Head of the Computer Systems Office, adds that the majority of items available under the University's new open access policy are vended directly from the University's EMu OAI-PMH harvester into the cross-collections discovery infrastructure. You can take a look at the Discover Yale Digital Commons here.

The EMu Community Grows

KE Software is pleased to welcome the following institutions to the community of EMu Users:

RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, Australia

RMIT Gallery is Melbourne’s most vibrant public art and design gallery. The Gallery presents Melbourne’s broadest and most unique exhibition program, exploring all aspects of visual culture through exhibitions of Australian and international design, including fashion, architecture, fine art, craft, new media and technology.

Department of Primary Industries, Victoria, Australia

The Department of Primary Industries (DPI) is responsible for agriculture, fisheries, earth resources, energy and forestry in the State of Victoria, Australia. DPI designs and delivers government policies and programs that enable Victoria's primary and energy industries to sustainably maximise the wealth and wellbeing they generate, by providing essential goods and services, employment, investment and recreational opportunities.

Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Denver, Colorado, USA

The Denver Museum of Nature & Science is the Rocky Mountain region's leading resource for informal science education. A variety of exhibitions, programs, and activities help Museum visitors experience the natural wonders of Colorado, Earth, and the universe. 

Arts Queensland, Queensland, Australia

Arts Queensland is dedicated to supporting and growing Queensland's vibrant and innovative arts by promoting a diverse, dynamic, creative culture, strengthening partnerships and collaboration, and capitalising on Queensland's unique strengths and characteristics. Arts Queensland is a funding and advisory agency of the Queensland State Government committed to achieving a strong, sustainable arts environment that celebrates Queensland's unique cultural identity.

EMu 4.0.04

With EMu 4.0.04 (release date to be announced), Multimedia functionality will be enhanced with the option to include supplementary media with a multimedia resource. The purpose of supplementary media is to allow associated resources to be stored with a master resource in the same Multimedia record. Supplementary media does not replace the use of over-arching records to related multimedia where each resource is important in its own right, rather it provides a mechanism for storing other media with the master resource that may be used along with the master resource.

A Supplementary tab has been added to the Multimedia module; similar to the Resolutions tab, it allows media to be added, deleted, modified, viewed and saved. The Multimedia drop-down menu available in each module has been extended to allow supplementary media to be viewed and saved. It is also possible:

• To import supplementary media using the EMu Import facility.
• To use supplementary media in reports.

Full details can be found here.

EMu Help

The EMu Help is constantly being improved and updated as new features are added to EMu.

As the Help is updated frequently (and more often than a new release of EMu becomes available), the most recent Help files have been made available from our website. Download the latest version (International English, US English, French), and replace the existing file.

Client Profiles

The Manchester Museum is one of the UK's largest museums and its largest university museum. It works closely with other parts of the University of Manchester to deliver the university's social responsibility agenda. The collection is enormous, with around four and a quarter million objects. These come from every continent of the globe and include both natural sciences and humanities collections, from Archaeology to Zoology.

An app has been developed to accompany the newly reopened Living Worlds gallery and just like the gallery, the app is about the natural world and people’s relationships with it.

The Living Worlds project (gallery and app) was designed by villa eugénie, a world-leading Brussels-based design firm, which helped to transform ideas and stories into a physical reality, working in collaboration with museum staff and the app developers.

The Living Worlds app shows a floor plan of the exhibition space that users can explore via virtual display cases. The mobile user sees a facsimile of each display case in the exhibition and can 'touch' the objects on their screen to discover images, facts, stories and even videos about the hundreds of museum specimens included in the exhibition.

Free wifi is available in the gallery and the content presented is delivered from Manchester Museum's live collections management system EMu.

KE Software built an API for the app developers (Mubaloo). The API supports queries to the Narratives module in EMu where the information is stored in a hierarchy of 'cabinets' with their objects. Mubaloo developed the App, for both iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, which can be downloaded for free on both platforms.

"We wanted Living Worlds to be a new type of natural history gallery for the 21st century, that went beyond describing and classifying the natural world to one that engages people with the wonder and mystery of nature for the benefit of their own well-being and the environment. Working with KE Software and Mubaloo using App technology meant that we could combine collections management, exhibitions and public engagement in a really neat way, delivering this vision for our visitors and for other App users."

Henry McGhie, Head of Collections and Curator of Zoology

With the most extensive collection of pharaonic antiquities in the world, the Egyptian Museum, Cairo (EMC), offers visitors and researchers a unique opportunity to explore the art and rich history of one of our oldest civilizations from prehistoric times through to the Roman period. Opening in 1902 with approximately 20,000 objects, the collection has grown to more than 200,000 objects today. The EMC’s principal goals are to conserve Egypt’s rich heritage and make it accessible to present and future generations.

The Registration, Collections Management and Documentation Department (RCMDD) has used EMu since 2009 when data was migrated from a Filemaker database as part of Egyptian Museum Database and Registrar Training Projects funded by the American Research Center in Egypt’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and USAID.

The RCMDD receives more than 200 requests from outside scholars each year. Some of these requests are for object study, some for information or photographs. The RCMDD uses the Events module to keep track of these requests, creating a record for each request and assigning an Outside Request (OR) number. Each record is linked to relevant information in other modules, one or more objects in the Catalogue module for example, as well as information on the requester (name, contact details, etc.) in the Parties module. Since more than one person typically works on any request, the Tasks tab has proved an invaluable tool for keeping track of the process.

"EMu has been very efficient when it comes to tracking the requests that come to the Registration, Collections Management and Documentation Department of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, for object information and images. We have been using the Events module for that purpose. The many different tabs and fields in the module enable us to find a place for all the information we need to include. For instance, we use the Multimedia tab to attach copies of signed and approved requests, and we track the process using the Tasks tab. The database's ability to sort by Event Number also makes it easier for us to organise things, since we work on a first come, first served basis. We use the Record Status field on the Request 1 tab to track where we are in the process, and the database's ability to search using any field makes it easier for us to search for requests that are still "to do" or those that are "in process", etc.

We can add the objects about which a scholar needs information to the Objects tab, and use "view attachments" to check if these objects have been requested by any other scholars, so that we can make sure that we do not have more than one scholar publishing the same objects. EMu's ability to generate different types of Crystal Reports also makes it easy for us to select the type of report that best suits the type of request received. EMu has been an invaluable tool for our work on Outside Requests."

Did You Know...?

... Two modules, introduced with EMu 4.0.03, provide integrated pest management support:

• Traps
  Records information about the types and locations of traps used by an institution to capture pests.

• Trap Events
  Records information about what was found in a trap at a given date and time.

A comprehensive set of reports provide graphical data about the prevalence of pests within your institution.

Tips and Tricks

The following steps provide an efficient method for copying a list of values and pasting them into a field in order to search for each one of them or to add all of them to a record.

In this example, we search for a list of IRNs in the Catalogue module:

1. Copy a list of IRNs from a list.
   The list can be in any document such as MS Excel, Word, etc. The only stipulation is that each value is separated by a carriage return (which will generally be the case in Excel when values are entered one per row in a column, or in Word when each value is on a new line).
2. Locate the Internal Record Number field on the Admin tab in the Catalogue module.
3. In order to paste the values it is necessary that the first row in the table field is highlighted (the dotted line must surround the row). It is not sufficient that the cursor is in the row.
   One way to ensure the first row is highlighted is to place the cursor in the first row and then click the second row in the table field: the first row becomes highlighted.
4. Right-click the first row.
   A context menu displays. 
5. Select Paste:
   
   The values are pasted into the field, one value per row:
   
   Now a search can be run to return all Catalogue records with the listed IRNs.

To remove your name from the KE News mailing list, please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
To receive the EMu Newsletter, join the EMuUsers Forum and subscribe to the EMu Newsletter forum (details here).
For any questions or feedback, please email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Contact Us | KE Software | EMu Home