Welcome

With so much happening at KE Software since the last issue of the newsletter in October 2006, this issue has run a little later than anticipated. The good news is that there is lots of news. The usual features are updated: User Meetings, New Clients, Support and Training, Did You Know (automatic sorting of search results) and Tips and Tricks (attaching records by dragging and dropping records in List View). We also take a look at two successful projects at the Natural History Museum, London, and a project to implement Radio Frequency Identification at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis; exciting new functionality introduced with EMu 3.2.03 is detailed, and we profile two of our new UK clients, Hull Museums Service and the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford.

In this Issue

• EMu User Group Meetings
• KE on the road: Conferences & Trade Shows
• New Members of the EMu User community
• EMuUsers.org Update
• Release Info
• Support
• Training
• EMu Client Profiles
• Did You Know?
• Tips and Tricks

3rd North American EMu Users Meeting, 15-17 October 2007

This year's North American EMu Users Meeting will be hosted by the New York Botanical Garden on 16-17 October. As last year, the EMu Users Meeting will be preceded by the Natural History SIG meeting on 15 October, this time hosted by the American Museum of Natural History.

Please email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (with a Subject of:

More details will be available from EMuUsers.org.

6th Australasian EMu Users Meeting, 5-6 September 2007

The Australasian Users Meeting will be held in Adelaide on 5-6 September, co-hosted by the Art Gallery of South Australia, the South Australian Museum and the History Trust of South Australia. If you are interested in making a presentation, please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

More information, including registration details, will be available from EMuUsers.org.

2007 UK EMu User Group Meeting

The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester hosted this year's UK EMu User Group Meeting on 12-13 April. The meeting program comprised many entertaining and informative presentations from a cross-section of Art, Cultural History, Natural History and Science museums; KE Software staff; and representatives from industry standards bodies. An update on the SPECTRUM standard was presented by the Chief Executive of the MDA as well as a presentation from the Chair of the ICOM/CIDOC Documentation Standards Working Group, describing the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. .

Hosted tours were also a very successful part of the conference program with tours of the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Gallery of Costume, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the People's History Museum.

Interestingly a number of prospective EMu customers also attended the meeting for first hand discussion with existing EMu users.

All presentations will be posted on EMuUsers.org soon.

The next UK EMu Users meeting will be hosted by the Natural History Museum in London in April 2008.

Natural History Museum, London: Entomology & Palaeontology departments go-live

So far this year two more departments of the Natural History Museum have gone live with EMu: in January the Entomology department with its collection of 28 million specimens of insects and other terrestrial arthropods, and in February the Palaeontology department.

The Entomology department required the implementation of a different way of cataloguing data, the result of which is a new module that enables the department to group individual specimens with a common taxonomic classification. Although the migration of data was complex, the end result is a more manageable 1.1 million catalogued specimens and over a million different taxonomic names.

By 2009 the department's collection will be housed in the Darwin Centre Two, a £70 million building currently under construction. With its state of the art labs, visitors will be able to look behind the scenes and explore the ever evolving natural world.

Getting the Palaeontology department live with EMu involved considerable enhancement of the EMu client, including development of the Stratigraphy module. This will be used to hold information relating to Biostratigraphy, Chronostratigraphy and Lithostratigraphy.

The Palaeontology department's legacy data was heavily dependent on Unicode characters. Although EMu's support for Unicode is not yet an officially released feature, it was necessary to move ahead with its implementation in order to migrate the department's data, making the NHM's Palaeontology department the first to run EMu with Unicode.

The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis

Recently, The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis (TCM) began work to implement Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tracking of their collection. After visiting the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis and seeing first hand how the staff at the Walker use RFID technology to track locations of artefacts, conduct inventories and efficiently download data into their database, TCM decided to test the technology on a 300 piece collection of two and three-dimensional artwork.

Collections Management staff are working closely with Northern Apex, providers of the equipment, software and tags; IT staff are focussing on database compatibility; and Conservation staff are determining the safest tagging methods. After tagging the test collection and running inventory reports using the new equipment, future plans include wider application for upcoming exhibits and possible use of interactive technology by visitors.

Following the 2006 North American EMu Users Conference, TCM identified opportunities for using the Narratives module and RFID in conjunction with hand-held technology such as PDAs. IT staff, who have described the project as "one of the coolest projects we’ve been involved with here", particularly appreciate the flexibility of the EMu database to coordinate with the outside software.

For more information about the implementation of RFID technology at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

KE on the road - Conferences and Trade Shows

Over the coming months KE Software will be attending conferences and trade shows in North America, Europe and Australia (details are available from the KE Software website).

The Museums & Heritage Show
London, UK, 9-10 May

American Association of Museums: Museum Expo 2007: Why Museums Matter
Chicago, Illinois, USA,13-17 May

SPNHC Annual Meeting: Building for the Future: Museums of the 21^st Century
Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, 21-26 May

American Public Gardens Association: Annual Conference: Defining Your Garden's Culture
Washington, D.C., USA, 26-30 June

Museums Association Conference: Annual Conference
Glasgow, UK, 22-24 October

Museum Computer Network (MCN) Conference: Building Content, Building Community: 40 Years of Museum Information and Technology
Chicago, Illinois, USA, 7-10 November

The EMu Community Grows

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

Washington State Historical Society (WSHS), Tacoma, WA, USA

Washington State Historical Society houses permanent exhibits on the arrival of European and American explorers, hardships of travel on the Oregon Trail and earning a living on the Wageworkers Frontier. The 106,000 square foot museum boasts soaring spaces and dramatic archways that invite you into a history experience full of colours, textures, sights, and sounds. People of all ages can explore and be entertained in an environment where characters from Washington's past speak about their lives. Through interactive exhibits, theatrical storytelling, high-tech displays and dramatic artefacts, learn about Washington's unique people and places, as well as their impact on the country and the world. More than 30,000 students visit the museum on field trips every year to learn Washington history.

University of Pennsylvania Archaeology and Anthropology Museum, Philadelphia, PA, USA

KE Software is pleased to announce that the University of Pennsylvania Archaeology and Anthropology Museum has joined the EMu family (more details).

Hull Museum Service, Hull, UK

The Hull Museum Service includes nine museums which together attract nearly half a million visitors each year... (details below).

Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford, UK

The Museum of the History of Science's collection of scientific instruments, experiments and ephemera from the 15^th to the early 20^th century is housed in the world’s oldest surviving public museum building, the Old Ashmolean on Broad Street, which was opened in 1683... (details below).

EMuUsers.org Update

300+ EMu users worldwide are currently registered with EMuUsers.org, a site maintained by and for users. KE Software regularly submits answers to FAQs and participates 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 3.2.03 now available

Released on 29 March, EMu 3.2.03 addresses a number of issues, and includes a range of new features:

• New Conservation module
  A new version of the Conservation module has been designed in consultation with users and incorporated with the standard EMu release.
• ImageMagick Libraries
  New image display libraries support over 100 image file formats, allowing the Multimedia Repository to store and interpret more image formats than previously possible.
• Audio and Video support
  The audio and video libraries used by EMu have been replaced with new libraries that provide support for a larger range of formats.
• Metadata support
  The Multimedia module has been extended to provide support for the following metadata standards:
  • EXIF - Exchangeable Image File Format
  • IPTC - International Press Telecommunications Council
  • XMP - Extensible Metadata Platform 
  The module contains three new tabs (EXIF, IPTC and XMP) that hold the metadata for each of these standards. The metadata is extracted from images and stored in the multimedia record, making it available for searching and reporting. It is also possible to embed metadata from a master image in any of its derived images.
• Other changes to the Multimedia module
  The Resolutions and Characteristics tabs include a range of new and modified fields. On the Resolutions tab these include:
  • MD5 Checksum field for all media (useful for checking validity of media).
  • Colour Space field (RGB or CMYK).
  • Image Type field (Monochrome, Greyscale, True Colour or Palette).
  • Image Resolution field (Pixels per Inch).
  • The Bits per Pixel field has been changed to Colour Depth (number of bits required to reflect accurately all colours).
    Properties from a master image are now extracted automatically and added to fields on the Characteristics tab.
• Drag and Drop media and URLs
  When adding media to the Multimedia repository it is now possible to drag media files (documents, images, audio, video, etc.) from Windows Explorer and drop them on the media display area on the Multimedia tab. It is also possible to drag a URL from your web browser and drop it on the media display area.
• Automatic sorting of search results
  Details below (Did You Know...)
  
  Detailed Release Notes about all of these changes are available from the KE Software 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.

Training

If you or your users require EMu training and you would like to save money, the solution may be to participate in joint training sessions with other KE Software clients in close geographic proximity to you. Training sessions can be organised in locations such as Ottawa, Washington DC and Chicago. North American clients who would like more information, please contact Danielle Knight at 604 877 1960 ext. 114.

Training sessions are also available at all KE offices and at customer sites as needed. Please contact us for more information.

An overview of Training courses is available on our course information page.

Client Profiles

Hull Museums Service

Hull Museums Service includes nine museums which together attract nearly half a million visitors each year. The museums have a rich and diverse range of collections, including anti-slavery, archaeology, craft and design, fine art, maritime history, social history and transport. A large proportion of the collections are designated as significant collections of international importance, and attract a number of publications and researchers annually.

With a clear need to radically overhaul and improve its documentation systems and procedures Hull City Council committed the £1.4m funding needed to make improvements over a three year period. The funding has allowed a dedicated collections team to work on collections management behind the scenes across the nine museum sites. The implementation of EMu will see the creation of a single integrated catalogue of its collections and allow these collections to be made accessible online.

In March the Wilberforce House Museum, birthplace of abolitionist William Wilberforce and the world’s first anti-slavery museum, was re-opened. The re-developed museum will explore anti-slavery past, present and future and aims to contextualise slavery for visitors in 2007. This year is the bi-centenary of the abolition of the British slave trade and Hull is commemorating Wilberforce’s role in the parliamentary abolition campaign.

Museum of the History of Science, Oxford

The Museum of the History of Science's collection of scientific instruments, experiments and ephemera from the 15^th to the early 20^th century is housed in the world’s oldest surviving public museum building, the Old Ashmolean on Broad Street, opened in 1683. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, navigation, medicine and experimental philosophy are some of the disciplines represented by the collection, which includes such objects as astrolabes, sundials, microscopes and mathematical instruments (including parts of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine). It also includes such iconic objects as a blackboard preserved from a lecture given by Albert Einstein at the museum in 1931, and the only known spherical Astrolabe in the world, made by Musa (1480):

By permission of the Museum of the
History of Science, University of Oxford

The Museum migrated to EMu from an MS Access based application. The EMu system implemented is based on the Gallery UK client, and the migration was made a lot easier with the technical knowledge of Elizabeth Bruton and Stephen Johnston at the museum. In all, there are roughly 16,000 objects in the collection and a further 11,500 narratives describing them.

Did You Know...

... records can be sorted automatically following a search?

It is now possible (EMu version 3.2.03) to specify that a sort will run immediately following a search. The specified automatic sort is highlighted in bold in the Sort box (Tools>Sort Results) - Name (ascending) in this example:

To specify an automatic sort, right-click its name in the Sort box and select the Sort after Search menu entry (a tick will then display beside the menu entry).

To turn off automatic sorting, right-click the active sort and select Sort after Search, removing the tick.

Tips and Tricks

Drag and Drop attachments

there are two ways to use the drag and drop technique to attach records. The first is to select one or more records and then click and drag the Drag Current Record or Drag Selected Records icon to the attachment field in the other  module.

In List View it is also possible to:

• Click and drag any single record to an attachment field in another module.
• Select one or more records and, by clicking and dragging any one of the selected records, drag them all to an attachment field in another module:

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