KE EMu User Group Meetings
4th North American User Group Meeting, Las Vegas, October 21-22, 2008
The 4th North American EMu User Group meeting was held at the Las Vegas Springs Preserve (LVSP) from 21-22 October 2008 in Las Vegas, USA. LVSP provided the EMu community with excellent meeting facilities and outstanding hospitality.
Attendance was great, and also included a number of institutions that had not attended before.
A wide range of topics were covered and all presentations provided usefull information of benefit to many EMu users. As always, there was ample opportunity for questions and socialising, providing attendees with an opportunity to share their experiences, and to seek help and advice.
The EMu User Group Meeting was preceded by the EMu Natural History Special Interest Group (EMu NH SIG) on October 20, which as always proved to be of great benefit for those that attended.
| Tuesday 16 October | Presentation |
Marcel Parent
Education Manager
Las Vegas Springs Reserve |
Creating a Culture of Sustainability at the Springs Preserve
Marcel gave an introduction of the Las Vegas Springs Preserve and discussed various ways in which organizations can become more sustainable and environmentally friendly.
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Kara M. Lewis
Collections Information Program Manager
National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Instituton
Carrie Beaucamp
Information Management Specialist
Anthropology, National Museum of Natual History, Smithsonian Institution
Patricia L. Nietfeld (in absentia)
Collections Manager
National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution
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Sites and Parties Cleanup: The Clone Wars
Carrie and Kara presented strategies they had implemented to eliminate duplicate, incomplete and inaccurate records. The presentations included information on how they determined standards that records needed to adhere to in order to be considered correct as well as methods they used for analyzing the data that was to be cleaned.
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Dave Smith
Petrology Manager
Natural History Museum
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Can EMu be used for insect pest monitoring?
Presentation Notes
Flash Presentation
Dave described how EMu can effectively be used for pest management by utilizing the Object Locator, including an idea for a new report type that uses the Object Locator to display information with respect to time.
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Bernard Marshall
Chief Techonology Officer
KE Software (Melbourne)
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 EMu New Developments - Part 1
 EMu New Developments - Part 1
Bern gave an overview and demonstration of the new features available in EMu 3.2.05, such as the audit roll back, improved drag and drop options, improved Groups module; new statistics module, etc.
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| Wednesday 17 October | Presentation |
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Bernard Marshall
Chief Technology Officer
KE Software (Melbourne)
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EMu New Developments - Part 2
Bern gave an overview and demonstration of the new features available in EMu 3.2.05, such as the audit roll back, improved drag and drop options, improved Groups module; new statistics module, etc.
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Larry Gall
Head of Computer Systems & Curatorial Affiliate in Entomology
Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History
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Coding at the Bar
Larry described how he used EMu to facilitate movement of some of the museum's collections from one building to another by using a custom bar coding script in conjunction with EMu.
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Ann McMullen
Curator
National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution
DucPhong Nguyen
Collections Information System Manager
National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution
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A Silk Purse from a Sow's Ear: Bringing NMAI Collections Information to the Web
Anne and Ducky gave an informative presentation on the challenge of getting the NMAI collection web accessable, which included how they verified data and utilized EMu to easily identify the condition records were in.
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Beth Gamble
Senior Systems Analyst
National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
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Multiple Label Reports via Texxmlreplicate
Beth went into detail on how to create label reports using the texxmlreplicate utility.
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Paul Cretes
Manager, Artifact Documentation & CCO Projects; Library, Archives and Documentation
Canadian Museum of Civilisation
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What does finished look like?: How to define cataloguing so that KE can be used to evaluate how well your collection is documented.
Paul described how the CMCC used EMu to answer the questions of who, what, where, when and how as it relates directly to the artifact and how to measure completeness progress.
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Discussion Group
| Disscussion Leader | Discussion |
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Chris Fincham
Head of North American Operations
KE Software (Vancouver)
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The EMu client via the Web
Explore options for making the EMu client available via a web browser using Citrix and other similar software packages. This can allow users to use the full EMu client while on the road or at home.
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Julia Hofer
Assistant Registrar
Winterthur Museum & Country Estate
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Using KE EMu's Power for Data Cleanup
When data from an institution’s previous database is converted and uploaded into KE
EMu, inevitably there are areas of muddy data that come to light. The challenge is to
identify the rogue records, determine the record or records to be retained, and eliminate
the extraneous records. Possible areas for discussion include:
What modules, tabs, and look-up lists are most likely to contain “muddy” data
- What methods are most effective to identify rogue records
- How to identify the best record
- What methods are most effective to eliminate the rogue records
- How to keep the data “clean” once a record or group of records have been laundered
- Related areas of interest to participants
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Brad Lickman
Account Manager
KE Software (Toronto)
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Cultural History Special Interest Group
This discussion will focus on potential areas of common interest among cultural institutions, with
the focus on the formation of a Cultural History Special Interest Group. The CHSIG would be
functionally similar to the Natural History Special Interest Group, where meetings would take
place once per year on the day before the official start of the EMu User Group Conference. Topics of discussion will include:
- Repatriation: Can it exist as a standard module in EMu? Can any of the existing modules (Events, Use Requests) be adapted to suit this process?
- Collection Events/Sites module(s): Too heavily focused on natural history collections?
- Narratives: Other uses in EMu besides a repository for publishing web data (research tool)?
- Tools for the handling of sensitive collections; are they adequate?
- Extensions to Parties to address indigenous requirements/cultural issues.
- Sharing data - what information could be shared? Thesauri? Parties?Cultural portal?
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Tracy Omar
Research
Las Vegas Springs Preserve
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EMu as a Tool for Managing Archaeological Data
How can we use EMu not only as a storage medium for archaeological data but also as a tool for analysis of that data. How can we organize provenience data and descriptive
data in ways that will enhance retrieval and analysis? The Springs Preserve team will
come armed with some answers and lots of questions. We hope for an active exchange
of ideas.
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Jay Kohut
Developer
KE Software (Vancouver)
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EMu Help Facilities
This discussion group will cover the help facilities available in EMu. This includes the Field Help Module and the compiled HTML EMu Help tool.
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Tom Hollowell
Informatics Branch
National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
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How are we getting EMu onto the Web?
Forum to share ideas on what is being done by users to disseminate the community's variety of collections data using KE web publishing tools or other approaches. Experiences with applications of EMu web php as well as any solutions considered for unusual situations are welcomed for discussion.
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User Group Meeting Photos
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About EMu 
