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Welcome
Welcome to the third and final issue of the EMu Newsletter for 2011. It has been an eventful year for EMu and KE, the highpoint of which was undoubtedly the 1st Global EMu Users Meeting in London in October. As we'd hoped it would be, this was an outstanding opportunity for EMu users from around the world to come together in an iconic setting, London's Natural History Museum, to network and share their knowledge and experience. Over 120 delegates attended the meeting, and the feedback has been extremely positive, ensuring that the Global User Group Meetings will continue, once every three years as originally planned. You can read a report about the meeting below.
You'll also find announcements about new members of the EMu family, another update about functionality on the way with EMu 4.0.04, profiles of EMu users and an IMu project, and in Did You Know you'll find information about useful enhancements to existing Registry entries.
And finally, as 2011 draws to a close, all of us at KE wish you all the best for the festive season and new year.
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In this issue
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2011 Global EMu User Group Meeting: It's All About the Collections
KE held the 1st Global EMu Users Meeting in London from 12-14 October 2011, combining the three regional meetings from Europe, Australasia and North America. The meeting was well attended with over 120 people travelling from all corners of the globe to participate.
The meeting was hosted by the Natural History Museum in its iconic building in South Kensington, and we could not have asked for a better location, or indeed a better host. We'd especially like to thank Darrell Siebert and all of the staff at the Museum for their support of the meeting.
Presentations covered a broad spectrum of topics, showcasing the many exciting and creative projects happening at EMu sites around the world. Many focused on IMu, the new Internet interface and infrastructure for EMu, and it was wonderful to see that these projects are already producing amazing results. A great success was the large and very well attended showcase session, where demonstrators were asked to describe how they approached a problem and solved it with EMu. This created considerable discussion and is sure to be repeated at future meetings.
Preceding the main event were meetings of the Special Interest Groups for Natural History, Conservation and Archaeology. Each generated useful discussion and will lead to blueprints for the future development of EMu.
Our special thanks to all of our presenters, without whom the meeting and special interest groups could not have occurred.
As always, the museum tours were very well received, with attendees having the choice of a peek at the Natural History Museum’s incredible collection of rare books; a tour of its extensive entomological collections; a visit to the fabulous Royal Academy of Music to see its amazing collection of instruments and original scores; or an “excursion” to Oxford to see the wonderful collections of the Museum of the History of Science. The museum staff conducting the tours were very knowledgeable and entertaining, and they have our sincere thanks.
During the meeting we held a party to celebrate KE’s 25th year in business. This was in the magnificent Australia House on the Strand. Harry Potter fans might know it as Gringotts Bank. It was a great night, thoroughly enjoyed by all. The party continued at the nearby Cheshire Cat (with a few people looking a bit weary the next morning).
Presentations and photos from this year's conference are available on the EMu website.
As always, a huge thanks to Christelle Hyppolite from KE for her tireless work in planning the meeting and dealing with all of the little mishaps that, thanks to her efforts, no one notices!
Next year we return to the regional meetings in Europe, Australasia and North America and have added a fourth meeting in the Middle East. Details below. We look forward to seeing you all again in 2012.
EMu User Group Meetings in 2012
After a hiatus in 2011 to allow for the 1st Global EMU User Group Meeting, 2012 will see the return of EMu's regional UGMs, kicking off with the inaugural Middle Eastern EMu User Group Meeting to be hosted by the Museum of Islamic Art, in Doha, Qatar from 30-31 January 2012. The 9th European EMu User Group Meeting is scheduled for 26 April 2012 hosted by the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester.
More details of these two meetings, as well as the 10th Australasian UGM (to be held at Museum Victoria in September) and 7th North American UGM (to be held at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in October) will be posted on the EMu website and in the EMuUsers Forum as they come to hand.
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The EMu Community Grows
KE Software is pleased to welcome the following institutions to the community of EMu Users:
Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture & Heritage, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE)
The Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) is the institution in charge of conserving and promoting the heritage and culture of Abu Dhabi. ADACH aspires to harness the pride of the people of the UAE through the development of its cultural heritage, and to be the leading cultural development organisation in the region.
Chatsworth Museums, Chatsworth, Derbyshire, UK
Chatsworth House is a stately home in North Derbyshire, England. It is the seat of the Duke of Devonshire, and has been home to his family, the Cavendish family, since Bess of Hardwick settled at Chatsworth in 1549. The Devonshire Collection is a record of one family's eclectic tastes and interests over sixteen generations and includes Elizabethan needlework to Enlightenment scientific instruments, Old Master drawings to 21st century sculpture. The Chatsworth House Library is said to be one of the greatest private libraries in the world, comprising over 30,000 books, including printed books from the past six centuries, fine bindings and illuminated manuscripts. Collected over many generations, they were brought together at Chatsworth in the early 19th century from the family’s various houses.
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EMu 4.0.04
In the last issue of the EMu Newsletter we looked briefly at the new Supplementary Media functionality built in to the forthcoming EMu 4.0.04 release.
Other functionality recently announced includes enhanced Password Management, which provides System Administrators with a range of options for managing user authentication and ageing passwords. It also allows users to change their passwords from within the EMu Windows client. The majority of the new password management functionality is available in EMu 4.0.04 without the need to have it enabled. In fact, most of the client side functionality is invoked by requests from the EMu server. For example, if a user's password has expired, the EMu server will inform the EMu Windows client next time the user logs in to EMu, prompting the user for a new password.
Full details can be found here.
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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 (details are provided with the download file).
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IMu Projects
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Bristol City Council: Using IMu for M Shed
Bristol City Council manages a rich and diverse range of collections across five museums, with three of the collections “Designated” by the UK Government as of national importance. The museum and art gallery collections are estimated as having over 1.75 million objects and include collections in Applied and Fine Arts, British and Foreign Archaeology, Social, Industrial and Maritime History, Natural Sciences and Ethnography.
The Council adopted EMu to be the central repository and management mechanism for all collections related information for the museum service. Another attraction of the EMu system for Bristol was the ease with which content can be published to the web and through gallery-based ICT and wireless technologies.
M Shed opened in June 2011. It is a new museum about the history of the city from prehistoric times to the present day, and challenges the perceptions of what it has meant to live in Bristol over the centuries through the recollections of the people who shaped the city. Part of the visitor experience at M Shed is driven by a set of kiosks running interactive displays explaining the objects and themes behind all exhibits in the museum.
Using IMu, KE Software's toolset for distributing data held within EMu via the Internet, the software running on these kiosks draws on data and multimedia kept within EMu, organised within a set of themes, sub-themes, stories and other interpretive material.
M Shed Gallery Kiosk – Object
Bristol uses the Narratives module to store the interactive kiosk content. Each narratives record stores the title and text for a single object or story. Narratives records and associated multimedia can be amended, inserted or deleted and this is reflected live on the kiosks the next day. The kiosks gather the data from EMu every night as opposed to having a constant link. This ensures that if there is a server failure, the interactive displays in the gallery aren't affected.
The M-Shed’s website draws on a similar subset of data from EMu, organised within a very similar structure of themes, sub-themes, etc.
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Client Profiles
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EMu at Qatar Museums Authority (QMA)
Most of the world now associates Qatar with winning the bid to host the 2022 World Cup – but this tiny gulf country is also the home to extensive world class museum collections which span many disciplines, including photography, Islamic Art, natural history, Qatari heritage, archaeology, sports and Olympic history, Oriental art, modern Art, weapons, coins and public sculpture.
QMA was established to manage these collections and related museums, and employs a multicultural staff to perform a wide range of museum duties, from events and marketing to conservation and collections care. Museum work in Qatar is a developing profession so QMA has employed a variety of staff from abroad to work alongside the extensive Qatari staff to facilitate skills sharing between museum professionals. The Chairperson of QMA is Her Excellency, Sheikha Al Mayassa Bint Hamad Al Thani, who has an active interest in the EMu project.
In 2008 the Museum of Islamic Art opened in the iconic I.M. Pei building on a purpose built island. ‘Mathaf’, the museum of modern Arab art, opened in 2010. The National Museum of Qatar is currently being redeveloped and will be housed in a building by Jean Nouvel, a project scheduled for completion in 2014. A Children’s Museum and a Sports and Olympic Museum are also planned in the coming years. QMA also manage a temporary gallery in the new Kultara (Cultural Village) development, which houses regular temporary exhibitions on a wide variety of subjects.
QMA selected EMu as the system to implement for collections management in 2009. One of the many reasons for this decision was that KE was interested in developing an Arabic language version of the database and also because EMu handles multidisciplinary collections effectively. Over the past few years, the need for a centralised collections management system has increased dramatically so that staff can work efficiently to meet the requirements of many ambitious projects. To date, all of the collections have been on ‘stand alone’ databases, so bringing the data together in one place for cross-collection searching is one of the main outcomes for the project.
EMu has been implemented at the Museum of Islamic Art, with the Orientalist Museum following in early 2012.
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Denver Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS)
The DMNS preserves unique treasures that tell the natural and cultural story of the Rocky Mountain region. Founded in 1900 the museum has grown to include archaeology, ethnology, geology, paleontology, health sciences, zoology, and archives and library collections, as well as education collections encompassing many of these disciplines. DMNS is now entering one of the most significant phases of its 111-year history and selected EMu as a key component of this transformation.
The Museum 20/20 Strategic Plan, adopted in 2008, identified several crucial objectives, including the enhancement of the quality, care, and public access of collections through focused collecting and improved preservation facilities. To that end, DMNS is constructing a new building wing that will house the Rocky Mountain Science Collections Center (RMSCC). Slated to open in early 2014, the RMSCC will allow DMNS to house, study, and preserve its more than 1.4 million artifacts and specimens; consolidate collections currently stored throughout the museum; provide proper temperature and humidity for preservation; and improve access to collections for museum scientists, visiting researchers, and members of the public.
The RMSCC addresses many of the preservation challenges the museum faces, but equally important is stewardship of the data associated with collections. To that end, DMNS began a search in 2010 for a new collections management system. Priorities included improving operational efficiencies, supporting museum participation in data consortia, and increasing access to collections by diverse internal and external audiences. DMNS selected EMu early 2011, with a target of being fully operational in mid 2012.
“We wanted a centralized database to encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration and to support pan-museum functions such as museum conservation and registration. EMu was the most comprehensive system we found, one that meets the needs of collections as diverse as anthropology, paleontology, zoology, and archives. In addition, we were impressed by EMu’s export and reporting capabilities, which will be crucial to future opportunities for collaboration and grant-funded research.”
Kelly Goulette
Director of Preservation and Documentary Resources, DMNS
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Did You Know...?
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... the following enhancements to existing Registry entries have been made:
- Operations Registry entry
The daDittoAll privilege has been added to the Operations Registry entry. From EMu 4.0.04 onwards, a user will require this privilege in order to have access to Ditto All functionality (Edit>Ditto>All Fields and the Shift+F9 keyboard shortcut).
- Indexing Registry entries
Also from EMu 4.0.04 onwards, a new Indexing Registry entry has been added that sets the unique attribute for one or more columns in a table. The format of the entry is:
System|Setting|Table|table|Unique
- Lookup Registry entry
A new AutoWriteIgnore permission has been added to the Lookup Registry entry, combining the AutoWrite and WriteIgnore permissions.
Full details can be found in the latest version of the EMu Help.
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