Welcome

Welcome to the second issue of the EMu Newsletter for 2009, a little belated but all the more jam-packed for that. In this issue we report on the latest EMu User Group Meetings and look forward to forthcoming meetings; announce some new members of the EMu family; look at features and functionality in the latest EMu release, 4.0.01; profile a number of EMu users, including the host of this year's North American User Group Meeting, the Minnesota Historical Society; and offer some tips and tricks for using EMu.

As always, we hope you enjoy the newsletter, and find it useful.

In this Issue

• EMu User Group Meetings
• New Members of the EMu User community
• EMuUsers.org Update
• Release Info
• Support
• EMu Client Profiles
• Did You Know?
• Tips and Tricks

7th European User Group Meeting, 3-4 June 2009

The 7th European EMu User Group Meeting was hosted by Bristol Museums Galleries and Archives (BMGA) on 3-4 June 2009, in Bristol, UK.

Fortunately (if a little unusually some might say), the meeting took place during a week of sunny weather in England and the meeting venue – The Pavilion – proved a hit with its balcony overlooking Bristol’s river. More than 45 EMu users took the opportunity to share their experience and expertise, some coming from as far afield as the US and Qatar.

The evening reception at the close of the first day of presentations was as enjoyable as ever, with many moving on to Bristol’s oldest pub in the pursuit of further scintillating EMu user dialogue.

The Meeting program included a mix of case studies, guest speakers and new developments; in particular, BMGA's presentation about the site archives tabs designed to manage their archaeological archives generated much interest. Other presentations included an update on the pest management tool by Dave Smith and a presentation on Web 2.0 by guest speaker Nicholas Croft. Copies of the presentations can be found on the EMu website, along with a selection of photos taken at the Meeting.

Special thanks to those who helped organise this year’s event, in particular Gareth Salway from BMGA, as well as the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery staff and the staff of the future Museum of Bristol for their interesting tours.

8th European User Group Meeting, 22-23 April 2010

The 8th European User Group Meeting will be hosted by Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum, on 22-23 April 2010.

Details are available on the EMu website and This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it can be emailed for more information or to register your interest in attending.

KE has reserved rooms at the Beamish Hall Country House Hotel for this event (details can be found on the EMu website). To book a room, please contact the Hotel directly on +44 (0)1207 233 733 and quote "KE Software". A non-refundable deposit is required before January 2010.

5th North American User Group Meeting, 20-21 October 2009  

The 5th North American User Group Meeting will take place in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, on 20-21 October, and will be hosted by the Minnesota Historical Society.

If you would like to make a presentation and/or suggest a topic for discussion at the Meeting, please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by 14 September 2009.

This event is supported by the Minnesota Historical Society and KE Software and there is no registration fee to attend. More information is available on our website, which will be updated as details firm up.

As usual, the EMu User Group Meeting will be preceded by the Natural History Special Interest Group (SIG) on 19 October 2009.   

For more information or to register your interest in attending the Meeting, please email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it no later than 18 September 2009.

The EMu Community Grows

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

Golden Dragon Museum, Bendigo, Australia

The Golden Dragon Museum is a living history of the Chinese people of Bendigo from the gold rush of the 1850s to the present day. It is the hub of Chinese cultural activity in Australia‚ allowing visitors to experience Chinese arts and crafts with visiting artisans and tradespeople.

The Golden Dragon Museum selected EMu to manage its rich collections of Chinese arts and crafts and to make them accessible over the web. EMu will also be used to manage the museum's extensive archive of newspaper articles which document the history of Chinese people in the region and throughout Australia.

NSW Department of Lands, NSW, Australia

The NSW Department of Lands has a collection of historic surveying equipment dating back to the beginning of European settlement in New South Wales. Although the Department does not have display space for its collections, it has chosen EMu to document the important objects in its collections and to provide online access to the objects and associated information, making it a virtual collection accessible by the public.

The Helsingborg Museums, Helsingborg, Sweden

The City of Helsingborg has selected EMu to manage its diverse collections. The Museum comprises three institutions:

Fredriksdal Museums and Gardens and Sofiero Castle and Gardens have live collections of wild plants and animals (about 3000 specimens).
Kulturmagasinet houses the collections of fine arts, cultural history objects, textiles and photographs (about 300,000 objects and 1.5 million photographs).

Dunkers kulturhus is an exhibition arena, which displays the museum collections.

The City of Helsingbord selected EMu for a number of reasons and outstanding features, not least EMu's Taxonomy module with its ability to manage live collections. Another appealing factor was EMu's Narratives module, which will allow the Museum's experts to record the stories of the objects and link them to other objects, to collectors, to places, etc. 

St Andrews University Library , St Andrews, Scotland

The St Andrews University Library dates back to the early 17th century and has a prestigious collection of photographs and historical documents relating to the history of Scotland.

The Photographic Collection, which comprises over 700,000 photographs, emerged from a collaboration between the University and photography's earliest pioneers. Since the Collection's inception, the photographs held by the University have been acquired in support of academic teaching and research, as a result of the personal interests of University staff, and through generous contributions by members of the local community. The picture library will be published online for research and public use.

Marc Boulay, Photographic Archivist, Special Collections, University Library, had this to say of the decision to implement EMu:

"The decision to select KE Software was one which was quite straight forward as the EMu system stood out significantly from the other candidates, offering the most comprehensive features, scalability, forward thinking initiative in-line with industry development with regard to photographic media and digital asset management, and all at the least expensive price. Their proposal was the most coherent as well as being clearly tailored to our specifications, communicating their vision and services very effectively and with enthusiasm for our project. The features and relational nature of the EMu system will allow us to make a significant move forward in the management of our Photographic Collection, and its surrogates.

More than this, as a tool for access, we are eager to harness and exploit the value of our supporting documentation which until now, as digital assets, was underutilised and inaccessible to our users due to a lack of central asset management. Decades of work which had barely seen the light of day will soon be available to all of our users, thus building on our past efforts, and encouraging a more dynamic interaction with our Photographic Collection in the years to come."

EMuUsers.org Update

410+ EMu users worldwide are currently registered with EMuUsers.org. KE Software staff regularly submit answers to FAQs and participate in the site's many Forums. If you have a question about EMu, you're likely to find the answer (or someone able to answer your question) on EMuUsers.org.

EMu 4.0.01

The long awaited release of EMu 4.0.01 has finally come to pass and while it took a little longer than anticipated to make its way from us to you, the reason for the delay was an ever expanding list of new features and functionality. A sample of the many improvements in EMu 4.0.01 includes:

1. A Statistics module
   EMu 4.0.01 sees the introduction of a Statistics facility that allows statistical information to be generated on a regular basis (hourly, daily, weekly or monthly) and stored in the Statistics module for later use.
2. Record Recall
   New functionality allows a record to be restored to the values it contained at a specific date and time.
3. Record Templates
   The Record Templates facility allows an existing record to be used as the basis for producing one or more new records. A wizard is provided to streamline the record creation process. 
4. Multimedia Drag and Drop
   A multimedia file (image, audio, video, documents, etc.) or URL may be dragged from the Windows environment and dropped on any control displaying multimedia. A new Multimedia record is created for the dropped item with the resulting record attached automatically to the control.
5. User identification
   The status bar, located at the bottom of each module, now includes the user name of the person logged in and the service (port number) to which they are connected. 
6. Font Settings
   A new option allows the font used to display data to be set.

Full details about new functionality and fixes in EMu 4.0.01 can be found in the Releases section of the EMu website.

Support

Hours of operation for KE Software support are:

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), rename it to emu.chm or emu_en-US.chm and replace the existing file.

Client Profiles

Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, Australia: Zooming and panning to our tree collections

Chris Ward
Living Collections Administrator
Botanic Gardens Trust
Royal Botanic Gardens 

With the launch of the new Trees in the Gardens website scheduled for mid October, it will soon be possible to zoom and pan to your favourite areas of the Royal Botanic Gardens via a high resolution aerial photo and supporting bed and lawn maps to obtain detailed information about our tree collections.

Discovering trees in the collection and the stories relating to them will soon become easier. It will be possible to zoom to the large canopied Moreton Bay Fig for instance, on Lawn 44a. This is The Children’s Tree, an old planting dedicated in 1983 at the request of Children of the Green Earth and proclaimed under the custodianship of pupils of Plunkett Street School. Perhaps you would like to see the locations of our Wollemi Pines. These will be displayed as locations on a map. Select one and supporting images and stories will be presented.

You will be able to locate and view images of the Dawn Redwood discovered 50 years prior to the Wollemi Pine. Metasequoia glyptostroboides, in bed 32, was planted from seeds received in 1948 derived from living plants first discovered in China in 1941. Alternatively, you can retrieve information on all of the trees in a selected area of the Gardens or even all trees with red flowers. You may then refine your selection from the list presented.

There is a wealth of information on our tree collections. Idiospermum austaliense for instance, in bed 65a, was discovered in 1902 near Innisfail, north-eastern Queensland. It was thought to be extinct after its habitat was cleared for sugar cane in the 1920s. Rediscovered in 1971 northeast of Daintree, when six cattle died of poisoning, a post mortem revealed the large seeds, about the size of billiard balls, of this lost species. It is now protected in the Daintree National Park.

Information on all of the Botanic Garden Trust Domain and Royal Botanic Gardens collection of 3,300 trees is soon to be made available over the web.

Funded by a grant from the Friends of the Gardens, the new website will be launched in mid October 2009. The website development has been guided by a brief provided by the Friends and is in keeping with the Botanic Gardens Trust’s commitment to provide web based access to information on our collections.

The Project Team members, including volunteer support from the Friends, have been working on this project since October 2007. The project has been enabled through the prior mapping of our tree collections in 2006 and the enhancement of our EMu database system to store precise location data for living collections. The ongoing access to tree data is facilitated by routine updates provided by the Domain and RBG staff.

The website will provide a range of ways for accessing information about our tree collection in the Royal Botanic Gardens and the Domain. Quick Search and Advanced Search pages will allow for text based queries by plant name, bed location, flower colour and flowering month.

A map based query interface will allow the user to zoom into and pan across an aerial photo of the Gardens and Domain and select an area or even an individual tree.

Display data will include images of the actual tree as well as interpretative information as currently appearing on our garden labels. 

A special feature of the website is that it will access our EMu collections database for tree location, interpretative information and images. Changes made to the database will be reflected immediately in the website.

KE Software has been engaged to provide the software and development work according to the Trust’s specifications.

(This article first appeared in the Winter 2009 edition of The Gardens, the Friends of the Gardens magazine.)

People's History Museum, Manchester, UK

With its unique collection of banners, satirical prints, posters, emblems, ephemera, ceramics, archives, photographs, tokens and badges, the People's History Museum (PHM) is the national centre for the collection, conservation, interpretation and study of material relating to the history of working people in Britain.

The Museum is closed to the public until late 2009 while undertaking a refurbishment that will see the Textile Conservation Studio and the Labour History Archive and Study Centre moved on site from their current location half a mile away. When it re-opens the Museum will be the only national museum in Manchester and will display the largest number of trade union and other banners in the world. The Museum will tell of the struggle for democracy in Britain over the last 200 years with almost 1500 objects on display, three times more than in the old museum. Visitors will be allowed to see behind the scenes into Britain’s only Conservation Studio dedicated to the preservation of banners. The Pump House (the existing museum building) is being refurbished to show off its stunning architecture and will be linked to a new four storey extension being built adjacent to it.

Leading up to its re-opening, the Museum is using EMu to identify and manage objects for display, flagging objects selected for future displays, recording their framing and display requirements (information that is accessible to the firm responsible for designing the displays), setting and managing tasks, and grouping objects by topic number for easy identification. At the same time, photographs of objects are being taken and added to the Multimedia module with its extensive multimedia management functionality. Images are then attached to Catalogue records.

The Minnesota Historical Society, St Paul, Minnesota

Founded in Minnesota by territorial legislature in 1849, some 9 years before statehood, the Minnesota Historical Society is chief caretaker of the state’s story. One of the largest historical societies in the USA, the MNHS manages 25 historic sites and museums around Minnesota, including buildings, houses, and museums. The MNHS History Center, located in St. Paul, is home to the Society's vast collections, comprising some 550,000 books, 37,000 maps, 250,000 photographs, 165,000 historical artefacts, 800,000 archaeological items, 38,000 cubic feet (1100 cubic meters) of manuscripts, 45,000 cubic feet (1300 cubic meters) of government records, 5,500 painting and drawings and 1,300 moving images. The smallest artefact in the collection is a pair of fleas, dressed in tiny costumes and stored in a tiny box, part of a 1968 doll collection, and the largest is the Minnesota State Capitol building, built in 1905.

Collection highlights include Seth Eastman’s watercolours depicting 1840s life in and around Fort Snelling, two 24-ton railway cars, beautifully handcrafted Ojibwe bandolier bags (the Society’s collection is believed to be the largest anywhere), historic American flags, vintage Valentines, Prince’s purple suit, and Arts and Crafts-era ceramics. 3,000,000 visitors each year tour Minnesota history online, searching the Society’s collections and State Archives, conducting research, and learning about upcoming programs.

MNHS, which has been an EMu user since 1999 and has nearly 600,000 catalogue records in EMu, is the host institution for the 2009 North American User Group Meeting, in October 2009.

Did You Know...

... that it is possible to use a keyboard shortcut to enter the current time and date into appropriate fields in EMu?

To insert the current date, use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+;

To insert the current time, use the keyboard shortcut SHIFT+CTRL+;

A keyboard shortcut just added to EMu allows you to insert a tab character in a text field: CTRL+ALT+TAB

For a list of many of the shortcuts available in EMu, download a Quick Reference Guide from the EMu website.

Tips and Tricks

With EMu 4.0.01, a multimedia file (image, audio, video, documents, etc.) or URL may be dragged from the Windows environment and dropped on any control displaying multimedia. A new Multimedia record is created for the dropped item with the resulting record attached automatically to the control. Allowing multimedia to be added via drag and drop may streamline the data entry process, however the Multimedia record created will only contain minimal data (default values, extracted metadata, generated resolutions, etc.). If extra data exists, the multimedia record may need to be updated manually. 

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