Welcome

We hope you find the Newsletter interesting and useful.

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

The 5th Australasian EMu Users Meeting, 6-7 September 2006

(Update from Nick Margiolakis)

The 5th Australasian EMu Users Meeting was held in Canberra, Australia on 6-7 September at the National Museum of Australia (NMA). Sixty EMu users were registered, with several more unregistered (but nonetheless welcome) attendees present on both days. Consensus is that this was another successful EMu meeting. The program and topics, presentations, and the venue itself drew particularly favourable feedback. Day Two commenced with the ever popular Q&A session, an opportunity for users to pose any EMu related question to KE. As there never seems to be sufficient time to answer all questions, the time allocated to this session will be increased at future meetings in an effort to bridge the gap.

Two guest speakers made presentations at the Meeting. Kylie Bower, a Crystal Reports consultant, spoke on the "Power of Reporting" and Emily Hudson, a Research Fellow at the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA) discussed "Directions in Copyright".

On both days, following the formal sessions, attendees were invited to participate in tours of local institutions of national importance: the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), National Museum of Australia (NMA), National Portrait Gallery (NPG), the Old Parliament House and Parliament House. Judging from the feedback, these tours were the highlight of the Meeting.

Presentations and photos will be available on EMuUsers.org in the near future. Tentative locations for future meetings are Adelaide (2007) and Wellington, New Zealand (2008).

Thanks to all who attended and contributed to this successful Meeting.

The 2nd North American EMu Users Meeting, 25-27 October 2006

The Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation (CMCC) will host this year's North American EMu Users Meeting at both the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec, and the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, Ontario. Building on the very successful meeting in Chicago last October this promises to be another excellent opportunity to share EMu knowledge and experiences and to participate in a dialogue with EMu's developers about where EMu is heading.

More details are available from EMuUsers.org.

The Field Museum, Fish and Invertebrate Collections go 'live'

KE Software is pleased to announce that the Fish and Invertebrate collections at The Field Museum , Chicago, went 'live' on 15 September 2006. Three of the Museum's collections, including that of the Botany Department, are now available to users through EMu.

The Department of Zoology is the largest of the Museum's four curatorial departments and is currently organised into six divisions: Amphibians and Reptiles, Birds, Fishes, Insects (with Arachnids), Invertebrates, and Mammals. Together the divisions total more than 17 million specimens. The Fish Collection contains approximately 88,000 Catalogue records, and Invertebrates, which includes the Hubricht Collection of Eastern and North American land snails and families, totals over 200,000.

KE Software is now working on the Photo Archives and Insect collections, which are anticipated to be completed and 'live' by June 2007.

KE on the road - Conferences and Trade Shows

Museum Computer Network (MCN) Conference (34th Annual Conference): Access to Assets: Return on Investment

Against the beautiful backdrop of Old Pasadena, MCN 2006 will explore useful and successful methods for accessing technology. The Conference is an opportunity to share challenges and triumphs in the quest to improve the "bottom line", keeping in mind that the bottom line is not always financial, sometimes it’s intellectual, and sometimes it’s just for the greater good.

Pasadena is minutes away from the museums and cultural attractions of Los Angeles and is home to the Huntington Library, art collections, and gardens, the Norton Simon Museum, and NASA's California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Lab. Danielle Knight and Sylvia Nikolova will be representing KE Software at MCN 2006 and look forward to seeing you there.

8-11 November, Pasadena, California, USA

The EMu Community Grows

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

In North America:

Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science, Davenport, Iowa, USA

Founded in 1867 the Putnam Museum of History and Natural Science is one of the first museums established west of the Mississippi. Home to over 160,000 artefacts and specimens, it is the largest museum in the Quad Cities of eastern Iowa and western Illinois. The Museum was named after Charles Edward Putnam, a lawyer who came to Davenport in 1854, and his family.

The Putnam Museum's permanent interactive exhibits bring visitors face-to-face with live river fish in a 718 gallon aquarium; let them touch a 200 million year old tree; and view a 3,000 year old mummy of the temple Chantress, Isis Neferit.

National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), New York, Maryland and Washington DC

NMAI has some 380,000 objects distributed across three locations: The George Gustav Heye Center in New York, the Cultural Resources Center in Maryland and the NMAI on the National Mall in Washington DC.

Assembled at the turn of the twentieth century by New Yorker George Gustav Heye (1874–1957), the collection is distinguished by thousands of masterworks from all over North America, and includes intricate wood and stone carvings, masks, elegantly painted and quilled hides, clothing, feather bonnets and pottery. It ranges from works on paper to contemporary prints and paintings to a wide representation of archaeological objects from the Caribbean, Costa Rica, central Mexico, and Peru.

Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, USA

Amon Carter Museum, located in Fort Worth Texas, was established to house works by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell collected by Fort Worth publisher and philanthropist Amon G. Carter, Sr. (1879–1955). The museum now boasts one of the finest collections of American art, encompassing a wide range of nineteenth and twentieth century paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and photographs. The collection also includes masterworks by Alexander Calder, Thomas Cole, Stuart Davis, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Georgia O'Keeffe, John Singer Sargent, and Alfred Stieglitz. The Museum's photography collection ranks among the top five in the country, with more than 30,000 exhibition-quality prints that cover the breadth of the medium's history.

EMuUsers.org Update

265 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 3.2.02 now available

Released on 15 September, EMu 3.2.02 addresses a number of issues, and includes a new Web Services structure with support for:

• Object Locator
  This utility plots the location of objects in a collection on a series of floor and grounds plans. It is possible to view details of objects, including images, and to relocate objects via a web interface.
• DiGIR (Distributed Generic Information Retrieval)
  This is a data provider protocol that allows institutions to make their biological collections searchable via external portals. An example portal is GBIF.
• Web Maps
  Data with latitude and longitude values can be displayed on maps of the world. It is possible to zoom or pan as required; map overlays allow the effects of various criteria (e.g. rainfall, climate, etc.) to be observed.
• Portal
  All data sources of registered institutions can be searched simultaneously, with the results shown in a web browser.
  Please note that the Object Locator, Web Maps and Portal are optional modules licensed separately from EMu.

Other new features are:

• Report Image Resolution: it is possible to specify the resolution of images when producing a report.
• Narrative Markup: format text in the Narratives module using standard html tags.

Detailed Release Notes are available on 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

Manchester Art Gallery

At the beginning of August, Manchester Art Gallery launched its new website. The site includes a brand new collections search interface which provides new ways to explore the collections online, including an A-Z artist / maker search and three highlights of the collections tours. These pages are the culmination of several weeks hard discussion and work between Manchester Art Gallery, Reading Room, and KE Software, and aim to make the collections accessible to online visitors in ways not possible before.

Liz Mitchell (Senior Manager: Online Gallery), commented:

Our new website marks the beginning of a new era for Manchester Art Gallery. Our aim is to provide a more user-friendly and enjoyable experience for visitors wanting to see more of our collections online. The new search is just the start and includes more visitor-friendly information, including object labels, than was previously available. However, we have great plans to expand this further to include audio commentaries and visitor comments and feedback.  Working with web developers Reading Room, and KE Software, we hope to develop a rich online collections resource that will complement (not replace!) the real thing on the gallery walls.

Did You Know...

...The Object Locator (which is part of the KE EMu WebServices suite and licensed separately to EMu) is an online mapping utility designed for pin-pointing the location of objects in an institution's collection on floor and grounds plans. It is a Java Applet running in a web page and can be launched from within EMu and EMuWeb. The Object Locator can be of use to EMu users as well as visitors to an institution:

• EMu users are able quickly and easily to search their Catalogue for objects and locate them on a map; plan the use of exhibition floor spaces; design pre-configured tours for visitors; develop and use Disaster Recovery Plans; and in a later release will be able to use the graphical display to initiate and record the relocation of objects.
• If an institution has enabled EMuWeb, visitors are able to plan a visit to a collection from home or can use an Intranet booth inside the institution, searching for objects they'd like to see, and locating them on a printable map; or perhaps they will opt for a pre-configured tour of collection highlights developed by the institution.

Tips and Tricks

emusecurity

The emusecurity utility must be run:

1. Whenever a user / group is added to the Registry.
2. Whenever a user changes groups.
3. When a user is removed from EMu.

Running emusecurity generates new security profiles for EMu. If it is not run after these changes to the System, users will not have the appropriate Record Level Security settings when they log in to EMu.

To run the utility, in the Registry module:

1. Select Tools>Generate Record Security from the Menu bar.

See the EMu Help for more details (under Working with Records>Record Level Security).

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