State of Dev, May 2025
An overview about recent developments around museum-digital in May 2025.
musdb
Development Frontend Importer musdb nodac
API New Features Object search (musdb)
Bringing back character-driven search for inventory numbers in musdb
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 …
State of Dev, February 2025
In terms of development happening around museum-digital, February 2025 was a rather calm month. While more happened in the “machine room”, immediately visible changes are mostly restricted to bugfixes. And a whole new tool.
State of Dev, December 2024 & January 2025
Once again a simple change log of the recent updates to museum-digital’s different tools.
Version Control & Batch Transfer Between Data Fields of Object Records
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 …
State of Development, November 2024: “Real” separated Measurements and a Better Recognition of Tags, Places, etc.
A short overview in list form of the recent technical updates around museum-digital, as of November 2024.
State of Development, October 2024: Searching Objects Currently On Exhibition, Linking Location and Acquisition of Literature
After the blog has been very quiet this year with regard to the technical development of museum-digital, we are now trying to publish the summaries of new developments – enriched with screenshots – that are prepared for the monthly “regional administrators” rounds in Germany anyway. These are in the form of listings, and this is …
Who is actually using musdb? And what for?
In its most recently published survey of museums in Germany the Institute for Museum Research (Berlin) asked how many museums use controlled vocabularies and norm data. 416 of the 3059 museums who answered the additional question sheet with this particular question answered that they do indeed use norm data. The survey concerns German museums as …
Automatically enforcing consistent naming of places
Last week I wrote about how new actors find their way into museum-digital’s controlled vocabulary for actors during imports. One of the first steps detailed in the post is the automatic cleanup of the actor’s name and the application of some rules to ensure a consistent naming of actors. For time names a much more …
Quality Assessments Like in musdb: Now For Everybody
At yesterday’s Autumn Conference of the Working Group Documentation of the German Museum Association (Herbsttagung der Fachgruppe Dokumentation des Deutschen Museumsbunds) a new web service in the broader realm of museum-digital was released: museum-digital:qa. museum-digital:qa reuses the importer‘s relevant functionalities to accept museum object data in a variety of input formats – both open standards …
EODEM Version 1.0 released
Since September 1, 2023, the first stable version of EODEM has been released. EODEM is implemented as a LIDO profile and aims to enable museums to share their object data – especially in the contexts of loans and exhibitions – with other museums at the click of a button. Congratulations! museum-digital:musdb has supported EODEM since …
Improved Workflow for Working with Loan Objects using EODEM
For some months, musdb has supported the upcoming EODEM standard for exchanging object information in the context of loans. The developments were covered extensively in a previous blog post. To summarize, the EODEM standard holds significant potential for saving registrars or colleagues taking over similar tasks in a museum a lot of time by providing …
Categorizing an object’s tags
… or “musdb finally supports materials, techniques, etc. from controlled vocabularies”. At museum-digital, there are four main centrally controlled vocabularies – actors, places, times, and tags. In more traditional collection management software however, the main field to control is usually the object type (is the object a helmet or a painting?). Simple tagging of the …
Summary of the monthly user meetup (April 2023) / New features and improvements
We continued the series of monthly user meetups and again discussed the new features and improvements. A summary can be found below. New Developments The last month has been an exceptionally slow month in terms of technical development around museum-digital. There are however some newsworthy tidbits. musdb Recording external IDs for museums Museums, like all …
Summary of the monthly user meetup (March 2023)
Yesterday, we held our regular user meetup as scheduled. As promised, below you can find an overview of the new features and updates below some more general points. General YouTube channel There now is a museum-digital YouTube channel. For now, one can find some German-language screencasts on different features in musdb and nodac there. New …
Analyzing and Evaluating Collection Data in musdb
A general benefit of using computer systems is – or should be – that data once recorded can be retrieved and reused in different contexts than originally intended and retrieval and reuse are incredibly easy to do when compared to the physical realm. And thus comes the want for ever more pervasive and broad evaluation …
A Timeline for an Object’s History Within the Museum
In musdb, there’s PuQi, indicating aspects of an object that may be better or more extensively recorded for publication. There’s “Plausi“, indicating implausibilities in an object’s recorded events (e.g. if the object was supposedly created by somebody who was clearly not alive anymore at the time of creation entered in the object record). There are …
EODEM – Efficiently Exchange Object Information During Loans
musdb now provides import and export tools for the EODEM standard, allowing for the simple exchange of loan object information.
Shipments and Acquisitions in musdb
In one transaction, a museum buys 50 objects at an auction price for 3600 Euro. What is the price of a single one of the objects in the transaction? Realistically there is none. But musdb required one to enter a price for the acquisition of each single object thus far. Hence, users were left with …
Upcoming Major Update to musdb
Usually the development of musdb (and the other parts of museum-digital software) follows a rolling release paradigm. A new feature is developed, tested, and then distributed. Updates are – usually – not held back. Over the last month, we made an exception, as there will be a lot of new features and a slight redesign …