June and especially July were at first glance once again rather slow months in terms of development at museum-digital.
Generally, the pace and type of development seems to have changed this year. Rather than doing many small improvements all over the place, there is less but larger and more labor intensive changes and new features. See for example the versioning in musdb (January), the tool for automating imports based on what others call a “hot folder” and the sort option to sort objects by their images’ aesthetics score (both presented here in March), and the new tool for suggesting formulations for object descriptions using large language models (June).
July
Frontend
- Translation of the software to Hindi and Telugu
- Grouping of tags by their relation to a given object
If an object is linked to more than 10 tags, the tag list of object pages quickly starts looking unorganized and messy. In such cases, the tags will now be displayed grouped by their relationship to the object (thus far: general tag, material, technique, object type, display subject)
musdb
New Features
- Export option for the specific LIDO as expected by the German Digital Library’s “colonial contexts” portal
Improvements & Changes
- The minimum length of fulltext search terms for object search parameters is now visibly enforced in the extended search user interface
To not overly burden the fulltext search server, any term in a full text search in musdb needs to be a minimum of two characters long. Thus far, shorter full text search parameters were simply ignored. This certainly was confusing at times. Since June, attempting to perform search queries with shorter search parameters is made impossible by a check in the extended search overlay. - Reception history of objects: Statements of the relevant position within a source can now be 40 characters long
- Transcriptions
- May now be up to 4000000 long
- New fields: Notes on the transcription, status, aims
Bugfixes
- Fixed a bug in the batch editing of specific visibility flags for data fields on the addendum tab
Juni
Frontend
- Performance improvements
- Object search now runs without a connection to the full text search server if no full text search parameter is set
- If multiple search parameters for an earliest / latest time have been set, they are parsed and combined before being forwarded to the database
- Improvements in the deletion of temporarily created PDF files (PDF export)
- Navigation has been translated to Tamil
musdb
New Features
- Recipient of deaccessed objects can now be linked from within the address book
- New tool for AI-aided formulation o object descriptions (based on existing other metadata)
Improvements
- Object search now runs without a connection to the full text search server if no full text search parameter is set
Importer
- The CSVXML parser has been extended to cover new event types and markings
- Object groups automatically generated to group all objects of an import can now receive a description as set within the import configuration
nodac
The list of selectable languages for the navigation of nodac has now been restricted to those in which there is actually a complete translation
