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Welcome
Welcome to the second issue of the EMu Newsletter for 2010. With so much happening at KE Software in recent months, not least the release of EMu 4.0.02, user group meetings around the world and the long overdue migration of the EMuUsers Forum to the EMu website, this issue of the newsletter is even later than usual. The silver-lining of course is that there are several very newsworthy items to report on! As well as looking at EMu 4.0.02 we report on the 8th European and 9th Australasian User Group Meetings, introduce the new EMuUsers Forum, welcome new members of the EMu community and visit the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
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In this Issue
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8th European User Group Meeting, 22-23 April 2010
The 8th European User Group Meeting took place in Beamish, UK, from 22-23 April 2010 and was hosted by Beamish, The North of England Open Air Museum.
Despite travel disruption and cancellations due to the volcanic eruption in Iceland, the meeting was well attended with about 40 people participating, including some new EMu users. Presentations included new EMu projects (as well as a very entertaining presentation on EMu case studies around the world), the usual New Developments presentation and several guest speakers talking about the SPECTRUM standard and the thesaurus.
Beamish is an award-winning open air museum which tells the story of the people of North East England at two important points of their history - 1825 and 1913. This venue and the food were excellent: the town area of the museum provided a great backdrop to lunch-time discussions and the evening reception at the on-site Victorian pub proved hugely popular with the attendees (as were the locally brewed ales!).
Tours by very knowledgeable staff were also a hit with the attendees.
Special thanks to all the staff at the Beamish Museum, in particular Kate Reeder and the tour guides, who helped organise this year’s meeting and made it such a success.
9th Australasian User Group Meeting, 21-22 July 2010
This year the Australasian User Group headed north to Queensland for the first time and to the wonderful setting of the University of Queensland (UQ). The UQ Art Museum was our host and the fabulous support from their Director and staff was greatly appreciated by the attendees. For those escaping the tyranny of winter at home, Queensland lived up to its publicity: beautiful one day, perfect the next!
The agenda was packed with interesting, thought-provoking and helpful presentations. A new session format, the "Showcase" was trialled, providing presenters and the audience a great chance to interact while looking at live demonstrations of client’s EMu installations. Five presenters, each allocated about 20 minutes, presented a challenge they had faced and how it was solved with EMu. This session proved to be very popular, requiring no scripted presentations and involving lots of interaction. Several technologies were used to access the live systems: WebEx (3 clients), VPN and Citrix. KE is keen to add this to future programs.
The reception was wonderful and we thank the UQ Art Museum for sponsoring it. Drinks and delicious canapés in an open-air garden within UQ provided a splendid forum for networking and further discussion on the day's topics. Many of the clients continued on afterwards to Brisbane City Centre, a delightful 20 minute ferry ride from UQ.
Thanks to all who made this another successful event. Special thanks to the presenters, tour guides and the staff of the UQ Art Museum.
EMu User Group Meeting 2011
Next year there will be a Super User Group meeting held at the Natural History Museum, London from 12-14 October 2011. This meeting will be in lieu of the Australasian, North American and European EMu User Groups and we are aiming to have a full programme covering 3-4 days with attendees and presenters from around the world. We hope to see you there.
Details will be announced on the EMu User Group Meetings Forum as they become available (so be sure to subscribe to the User Group Meeting forum to receive updates!)
EMuUsers Forum
After much delay and many complications the EMuUsers Forum has finally moved from its first home at Museum Victoria to the EMu website. Much of the delay was due to the absence of any simple mechanism to export content from the original DotNetNuke Forum and into the new Joomla (Agora) Forum, necessitating much manual processing and manipulation of content and user accounts. All user accounts setup with the old Forum have been migrated, although this did require that passwords were reset to keguest for the majority of users (but not if you had an existing user account with the EMu website). When you log in to the EMuUsers Forum you'll find details in Forum Announcements about how to change your password.
In Forum Announcements you will also find details about how to subscribe to a topic or forum. You may also want to check out the Forum FAQ, especially if you are having difficulty logging in to the site using Internet Explorer.
Finally, many thanks to Forbes Hawkins at Museum Victoria for his work over the years in establishing and running the EMuUsers Forum.
Newsletter Forum
In future, we will be announcing the release of the EMu Newsletter through the EMu Newsletter Forum. If you would like to be informed of the availability of the latest issue of the newsletter, please be sure to subscribe to this forum.
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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 Australasia:
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The EMu Community Grows
KE Software is pleased to welcome the following institutions to the community of EMu Users:
Wandsworth Museum, London, UK
Details below in Client Profile.
Redland Art Gallery, Cleveland, QLD, Australia
Redland Art Gallery features six exhibition spaces at two galleries in Cleveland and Capalaba, specialising in presenting a varied program of cultural exhibitions that looks to define a Redlands' cultural identity.
University of Chicago Oriental Institute, Chicago, Illinois, USA
The Oriental Institute is a research organisation and museum devoted to the study of the ancient Near East. Founded in 1919 by James Henry Breasted, the Institute, a part of the University of Chicago, is an internationally recognised pioneer in the archaeology, philology and history of early Near Eastern civilisations.
Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan, USA
The Henry Ford Museum provides unique educational experiences based on authentic objects, stories and lives from America's traditions of ingenuity, resourcefulness and innovation. The Museum sees its purpose as inspiring people to learn from these traditions to help shape a better future.
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EMu 4.0.02
EMu 4.0.02 was released in late June and includes a raft of new features and improvements, including:
- Support for Right-to-Left languages.
- A new Export Schedules Facility, enabling data to be exported on a regular basis.
- Enhancement of the Import Facility to allow data to be prepended / replaced / appended in tables and nested tables of values.
- A new report type supporting ESRI's ArcExplorer, allowing latitude / longitude points to be plotted on maps.
- Improved time to save records.
- Several graphics improvements, including: alpha channel support; improved attaching and importing of multimedia.
- Display of a user's group in the module Status bar.
Full details, including a PDF document combining all new User documentation, can be found on the EMu website.
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Support
Hours of operation for KE Software support are:
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North America:
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9:00 AM - 8:00 PM
6:00 AM - 5:00 PM
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(EST)
(PST)
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Europe: |
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM |
(BST) |
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Asia-Pacific:
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9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
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(AEST)
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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.
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Client Profiles
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Powerhouse Museum
The Powerhouse Museum (PHM) in Sydney focuses on ideas and technologies that have changed the world. Beginning in 1879 as The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, and with a collection that has been built up over more than 125 years, the PHM encourages visitors to discover and be inspired by human ingenuity.
PHM adopted EMu in 2002 to manage an extensive and significant cultural history collection of more than 385,000 objects. The collection spans history, science, technology, design, industry, decorative arts, music, transport and space exploration. The museum has offsite and onsite storage as well as a cavernous display space in Sydney’s original power station. Movement of objects, stocktaking and event management are major activities for the Registrations and Events teams and EMu is used for object tracking and requests for objects. PHM uses MVWISE in conjunction with EMu.
About 3% of the collection is on display in the museum, however there is also a program at the storage facility in outer Sydney for the public to view objects “behind the scenes”. At The Powerhouse Discovery Centre, many of the objects on display at the storage facility are rarely on display at the actual museum.
PHM uses EMu to store images and the Narratives module to manage all of the content from the objects going out to the web. Some narratives link to as many as 10,000 objects. Thematic narratives are currently being developed to add to existing information.
PHM is said to be the most popular museum in Australia with 22 permanent exhibitions and five spaces for travelling exhibitions. EMu provides the 286 full time staff and 344 volunteers with a system that underpins vital collection management functions essential to running a busy museum
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Wandsworth Museum
The new Wandsworth Museum (WM) will explore and explain the history of the region (Wandsworth is a district of South West London), from the Ice Age (25,000 years BCE) to the present day and beyond. Through a unique and world-class collection of historic artefacts, documents, paintings, audio recordings and photographs the story of Wandsworth will be brought to life for people of the region and the wider world. The museum tells the story of Wandsworth across three key themes: "What Lies Beneath" – The Landscape and Natural History of Wandsworth; “The Human Landscape” – The Landscape & Structures humans have created; and “Living in Wandsworth” – All aspects of daily life throughout the ages.
In addition to its unique collections, WM will also provide a rich array of education programming, live events, interactive exhibits, and outreach programmes. An innovative new website will give access to the entire collection and will actively engage the local community in gathering and publishing the history of the region.
After an extensive evaluation and procurement process EMu was selected as the collections management system for its ability to cope with the broad range of objects held by the WM, and for its inherent support for creating rich, annotated interconnections between objects. EMu’s handling of secondary materials and its excellent standards compliance were also important factors. Migration of the data from the original Wandsworth Museum’s MODES catalogue is nearing completion, and the WM will now be working closely with KE Software on the development of the website which will use the new IMu development framework to integrate the catalogue with the museum’s WordPress-powered website.
[Courtesy of Wandwsworth Museum].
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Did You Know...
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... EMu's Import Facility has been extended in EMu 4.0.02 to allow data to be prepended / replaced / appended in tables and nested tables of values. Support is provided for both XML and CSV (Comma Separated Values) data formats. A grouping mechanism allows data across multiple fields to be added to the same row, allowing grids with multiple columns to have complete rows appended.
A complete description of the Import facility extensions can be found in the Appending data using the EMu Import Facility documentation.
... EMu has a new report type supporting ESRI's ArcExplorer (a freely distributable GIS viewer) allowing latitude / longitude points to be plotted on maps. The ArcExplorer viewer allows layers to be defined and enabled / disabled within the viewer. Data points may have associated metadata which is displayed when a point is selected.
A complete description of the Arc Explorer report type can be found in The ArcExplorer Report documentation.
... EMu has a new Export Schedules Facility which enables data to be exported on a regular basis. Data can be scheduled to be exported on anything from a daily to an annual basis. The export occurs outside working hours (generally early in the morning) and the results are stored on the EMu server. A user may then view the results and save / view the export files produced. The exported data may be processed by a filter to create the output format required (e.g. XML, CSV). The creation of a scheduled export is very similar to defining a report. A set of fields may be selected and the records may be sorted. A TexQL statement may be defined to limit the records exported.
A complete description of the Export Schedules facility can be found in the Export Schedules documentation.
... EMu now supports Right-to-Left languages. Arabic and Hebrew scripts are now supported, as are two additional left-to-right (LTR) languages, Greek and French (Canadian). The user interface has been modified to reverse the display of all controls and images when using RTL languages. Dynamic switching between RTL and LTR languages is supported.
A complete description of the support for RTL languages may be found in the Right To Left Language Support documentation.
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Tips and Tricks
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How to remove a value from a Lookup List
Things to keep in mind when trying to remove values from a Lookup List:
- A Lookup List is associated with a field in a module.
-AND-
- A Lookup List is typically rebuilt on a nightly basis from values that display in that field in any record in that module.
Deleting or changing a value in one record will not remove the value from the associated Lookup List if that value displays in the same field in another record.
For example, the word Pen appears in a Lookup List and we want to change it to Pencil:
- If the value is still being used, it is necessary to perform a global replace to change the old value to the new value (in our example, changing Pen to Pencil).
- Then check that the value is not set to be Persistent in the Lookup Lists module. If it is, change the setting.
Once this has been done the value should be removed automatically from the Lookup Lists module as soon as the Lookup rebuild takes place (usually overnight).
If the value is still listed in the Lookup List after the rebuild has run, please contact EMu support and provide them with details of the value as it is most likely included in a separate file of default Lookup List values and will need to be removed manually.
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