About EMu Overview of EMu Document your objects
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KE EMuDocument Your Objects
All of your objects can be documented in the EMu Catalogue, which also includes extensive support for recording individual parts of objects and relating them back to a parent object. Because object parts are arranged hierarchically, object parts can themselves have parts, which in turn can have smaller parts, and so on. EMu also supports specimen lot records in which one Catalogue record documents sets of specimens: several marine animals kept in a single jar, for instance, or a series of insect specimens pinned within the one drawer. EMu’s Catalogue can also be used to document new items derived from an existing object, such as media assets derived from physical objects (e.g. photograph of an engine) or preparations taken from organisms (e.g. skull or tissue sample). Multi-Discipline CatalogueEMu supports multi-discipline collections within the one Catalogue module. Examples of collection disciplines include: Cultural Collections
Art Collections
Natural History Collections
Special Collections
The EMu Catalogue is customised to the specific needs of each museum: you determine which disciplines are relevant to your institution. Each discipline can have its own set of fields so that users working within a specific discipline see only the fields relevant to them (in other words, users cataloguing pottery do not see fish fields). EMu detects the discipline of an object you are working with, whether you are inserting, editing, searching for or viewing records, and automatically adjusts the screen to display only those fields relevant to that discipline. However, as all records are contained within the one Catalogue module, EMu can be used to search across the entire collection (subject to your security profile). As well as discipline specific fields, EMu provides a suite of general fields across all disciplines, such as object type, location, condition, and so forth, ensuring that the same management processes can be applied within each discipline. EMu can even support museum processes that cross discipline boundaries, for example multi-discipline loans.
Catalogue Support ModulesAnother set of modules specifically support the EMu Catalogue. Using these, information about key aspects of the collection can be recorded once and then shared with all relevant objects in the Catalogue. Collection Events and SitesThe Collection Events and Sites module records information about the locality at which objects were collected. Details include:
Rights/CopyrightThe Rights/Copyright module holds information about the ownership or other rights or copyright provisions pertaining to one or more objects. It includes support for:
BibliographyGeneral bibliographic references, including books, journals, articles, papers and theses are recorded in the Bibliography module. PartiesThe Parties module holds information about individuals and organisations who have some involvement with the activities of the museum and its collection. Parties can be artists, authors, manufacturers, donors, collectors, researchers, staff, conservators, carriers, exhibition organisers, insurers, lending and borrowing institutions, and so on. Information that can be recorded includes name, various addresses and phone numbers, email and web addresses, and biographical and historic information. The Parties module provides support for synonymy of names (i.e. one identity known by several names) and is compatible with the Getty Union List of Artists’ Names. Thesaurus supportEMu’s Thesaurus conforms to the ISO Z39.19 standard and has specific support for the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), many discipline-specific thesauri, as well as user-defined thesauri. The Thesaurus facility includes sophisticated browsing and terminology manipulation, visually highlighting the tree-structure. As it is built-in to EMu’s search engine, a range of search options, including searches for equivalent terms, and a term and all or some of its narrower terms, is possible. EMu can be configured so that any field can be subject to thesaural control.
Extensive Cross-ReferencingEMu’s sophisticated record cross-referencing can be used to document the relationships between objects. While frequently used for parent-child relationships (e.g. composite object and its parts), it can also be used for ad-hoc relationships between objects. For example, a photograph which includes a collection object can be related directly to that collection object and vice versa. The nature of the relationship can also be documented (e.g. host-parasite). Relationships can be established between objects within the same or different disciplines. Users can easily browse from an object to its related objects and vice versa. Read on for details about how EMu can assist you to:
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The
core of EMu is the Catalogue module, which records information about objects
owned by, or at some time in the care of, a museum. The design and
implementation of the EMu Catalogue is based on industry standards and world’s
best practice. At the same time it is also fully customisable to meet the
specific and perhaps unique requirements of each museum.
EMu Calendar 2009
