A blog on museum-digital and the broader digitization of museum work.

Joshua Ramon Enslin

Joshua Ramon Enslin is a student of Southeast Asian Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. His main research interests concern contemporary labor migration, digitization, and the history of ideas in Indonesia and the Philippines. He has previously worked in translations from Indonesian to German and software development. At museum-digital he is mainly responsible for the further technical development of the frontend, musdb, and md:term. He has also contributed to the development of the "Themator", and contributed to the English and Indonesian translations of museum-digital.

Making Interoperability Easy

| 24. November 2025

Interoperability has been one of the focal issues around museum-digital practically since its inception. Offering different, simple ways to bring data into the system was a necessary requirement to even think of what we do. And offering simple ways to get the data out of the system again is just good practice – though all …

Development Frontend Infrastructure

State of Dev, June & July 2025

| 23. August 2025

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. …

Development Frontend Importer musdb
AI-generated ukiyo-e painting of a detective with a book, surrounded by warning signs

Bringing back character-driven search for inventory numbers in musdb

| 29. March 2025

If you search for “run”, you want to find entries (objects, blog posts, etc.), that mention “ran”. If you search for inventory numbers like “*1”, you want to find “0001”. These are fundamentally different categories of search. In the first case, you want to have a language-aware full-text search. In the latter case, you simply …

Development Infrastructure musdb
Screenshot of the start page of museum-digital:global in Kannada.

Kannada

| 25. March 2025

There’s lots of talk about the FAIR principles – publishing findable and accessible data. Logically, to be findable and accessible, the data should at the very least be described in the language of users, even if it is not itself translated. And that means, that before object information becomes multilingual, plattforms should become (more) multilinugal …

Development Frontend Translations
Screenshot: Concordance checker

A Concordance Checker for Preparing Imports to museum-digital

| 23. January 2025

When one runs an import to museum-digital – specifically one focused on internal collection management data – there is a chance to encounter errors of unmatched entries. The import tool identified that one tried to import a yet unknown value to what is a controlled field in musdb. Common issues appear especially with actor roles …

Development General Importer Infrastructure
musdb: Versioning overlay

Version Control & Batch Transfer Between Data Fields of Object Records

| 13. January 2025

The new year 2025 comes with two long-awaited new features in musdb: detailed version control of object data and an option to batch transfer object data from one free text field to another. Version control Until a few days ago, a central and sorely missed feature in musdb was a detailed version history of the …

Development musdb