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 sections on project page (www.museum-digital.org)

As already described in the previous post, the project page www.museum-digital.org now features a calendar. Since then, we have also added a small page listing people working on museum-digital – e.g. some of the coordinators and developers – as well as power users. The list will obviously always be more than incomplete, but if you want to be listed, just send a mail.

Development

musdb

Allow batch editing of photographers on image list

Running batch updates on the ownership, license status and photographer of a set of objects can be done either via the institution-wide settings page or via a selection on the image list page. The batch updating functionality of the institution-wide settings page works by replacing the given entries in one of the fields for all objects of the museum – it is thus not suitable if one is to only update the photographer field for a list of objects from a single collection (rather than the whole museum).

Batch updating images’ legal information from the image list (click on an image in the list and drag it to activate selection mode, then update by selection) was only possible in the case of image licenses and rights holders. With a small update, it is now possible to also batch-update the images’ photographers field that way.

The API can now update object event

Thus far, the API could only be used for adding wholly new object events (who did what, when, and where, with the object) or deleting them. With the updates of this month, now possible to directly update events.

This is already actively used in customizing musdb using a Tampermonkey script by some of the norm data editors. They can thus add a custom button to transfer incomplete actor or place information to the object’s description. This button, on the other hand, would not be useful for regular users at all.

UI improvements for the object search interface and new sort option

After a very fruitful discussion and feedback from Hungarian colleagues, we got around to some user interface improvements in the object overview and search interface. A lengthy discussion can be found in a dedicated blog post in German. To sum up: there are now headlines for each subsection of the sidebar and tooltips explain the different buttons and search and sort options upon hovering one’s mouse over them. Additionally, a new sort option was added to sort objects by the number characters within the inventory numbers of the searched objects.

Two bugfixes: Navigating to the previous or next object in a selection

It is a very simple but similarly useful feature: One runs an object search and thus creates a result list of objects. After viewing or editing one of the objects, one can then proceed to the next one in the results list by clicking at the arrows at the top of the sidebar.

Unfortunately, musdb had two bugs preventing this navigation for some of the available sort options. On the one hand, newer sort options required manually adding the search fields to a list specific to the previous/next navigation thus far – and had not been covered yet. Navigating to the next object after sorting by e.g. the length of the searched objects was thus impossible so far. The specific list of sort fields has now been removed in the previous/next navigation. Instead, the main list of sort options from the main object search class is directly used – in effect preventing such issues of “forgotten” values from ever appearing again.

A second issue concerned string-based sort options. For an improved performance, the previous / next navigation works by querying the underlying search index for the next object where e.g. the object ID is lower than the current one (`WHERE id > 20000`). The same search logic is straight-out not possible with string-based sort options, as search queries for values greater than or smaller than a given one cannot be executed with string-based fields.

Fortunately, the issue came up just after we had implemented an option to search and sort objects by the numeric components of their inventory numbers. Thus, the previous / next navigation can fall back to that sort option if a user wants to navigate to the next object after sorting by inventory number. As stated back when we introduced the new search and sort option: It should work for most museums. Unfortunately, there is no such option to mitigate the issues of string-based sorting when sorting objects by their names. The best we could do in this case is displaying a clear error message, stating that the previous / next navigation is not available when sorting by the object’s names.

“Home location” can now be selected as a required field when adding new objects

On the institution-wide settings page, museum directors (or those holding the same user role within musdb) can determine which fields are required when adding new objects. The list of selectable fields automatically covers all free text fields linked to the object. Repeat fields and references to other sections of musdb need to be manually implemented however. As the home or permanent location of an object is a most logical and common field to be required for all object, it was only consequential to prioritize making it available as a required field. We have done so now.

Major performance improvements in “list results” page

The “list results” page provides for a table view of object search results, allows the export of search results to Excel, and is – under the hood – also used for generating custom reports. We managed to achieve a considerable improvement in the page’s performance by bulk loading data and simplifying the code of the HTML page. Both adjustments should not really be noticable when one tries to list or export only some objects. Exporting some thousand objects should work considerably faster now however.

frontend

PDF metadata for main object PDF export

XMP metadata are now written into exported PDF files. Thus, users can more easily identify authorship, titles etc., especially when using specialized software like e-book readers.

Linking from collection descriptions

Collection descriptions are now being parsed for the existence of URLs. If one, starting with https:// (http:// is ignored) exists, the URL is automatically transformed into a clickable link.

nodac

We added some translation variables on the start page.

themator

The “themator” has received a small user interface improvement for mobile devices. The topic-specific navigation or table of contents is now moved below rather than above the main content of a page in the regular “topic” viewing mode on mobile devices.

Importer

Importing GIFs

To simplify the handling of images, museum-digital internally only uses JPG image files (webp versions are generated for a faster loading, but are optional). While they lack some support for features like transparency, JPGs provide for a much better compression with images of three-dimensional things and subjects not featuring solid colors. Newer formats like AVIF and Webp unfortunately still lack the support among locally installed image viewers for us to fully switch over to them.

The importer handles input PNGs by converting them to JPG files. Starting this month, the same can be done with input GIF files.

Improved handling of blacklisted actors, places and times

One of the key issues with imports is what happens after imports. Specifically, museum-digital uses controlled vocabularies for actors, places, times and tags that can be linked to an object directly or via events. When people enter new such entries using musdb, there are a number of safeguards and nudges to ensure productive inputs. Adding a new actor, for example, requires one to enter at least 10 characters of a description for the actor. Input fields for the date of birth and death are also provided. If possible, one can enter a Wikipedia or Wikidata URL (or ID) and directly fetch the relevant information from there.

During imports, there is no space for asking questions to the importing institution. Incomplete or false actor, place, time and tag names (for example, if two actors are linked as one; “John Doe and Jane Doe” is not one single actor!) are given, these are necessarily imported into our controlled vocabularies by default. Depending on the import, this puts a significant burden on our volunteer group of vocabulary editors.

To eventually get to a solution, we have added options for automatically rewriting terms (e.g. “Berlin, Germany” will be autocorrected to “Berlin”) and blacklisting them completely (“Good morning …” is no actor”). Thus far, blacklisted terms were simply ignored by the importer.

“Unknown painter” is not an actor, but the information that it is a painter may still be useful. To allow us to blacklist more and keep the controlled vocabularies “clean” without losing such data, the importer now imports blacklisted terms in event components (“who painted it?”) into the event annotation. If the only known information on the whole event is blacklisted, the event cannot be created – an event always requires at least one linked actor, place or time. The event annotation of “empty events” is hence moved to the object description automatically.

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

The next monthly meetup is scheduled for Tuesday, September 6th 2022, 5 p.m. (this post will be updated with a link to the meeting about a week before the meeting, as we are currently trying to organize a meeting room at Zoom or a similar service).

Update: The meeting will take place at https://meet.jit.si/museum-digital-meetup-202209

Recent Updates and New Features

musdb

XML Export

Creating new export formats for XML exports (beyond the main export formats md:xml and LIDO 1.0) is now possible using XSL files stored in a new git sub-repository. This git sub-repository is open source. As registration on our main Gitea instance is however restricted, please send a mail before contributing.

In line with this, we have also improved the representation of uncertainty in our default LIDO 1.0 exports. As version 1.1 of the LIDO standard has been recently released, we have also begun working on a LIDO 1.1 export.

Note: The pre-generated exports available through the “quick export” option are and will still only generated for LIDO 1.0 and md:xml.

Required coordinates when adding new museums

This update is only relevant to regional administrators. Coordinates of the institution are now required for adding new institutions.

QR Codes

QR codes can now also be exported in SVG and EPS, the two primary vector graphics format for use on the web and professional print layouting.

Another important improvement on QR codes is a new page that simply lists all QR codes leading to the object editing pages of a given search result in musdb. This page offers the option to manually set the size of the QR codes, so that suitable QR codes for internal collection and location management can be printed in bulk in a less paper-consuming way.

Calendar

A calendar view for all the events in the museum (events, start and end of an exhibition, start and end of loans) is now available. It can be reached by hovering the mouse over the puzzle symbol in the navigation. On the calendar page, single calendars can be selected or deselected and one subscribed to using one’s external calendar programm (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, or a mobile phone’s calendar).

The calendar, and especially the possibility to subscribe to the calendars, is also a first step towards enabling users to set reminders on object pages as this makes much more sense if the reminders can be integrated with one’s regular calendar application.

The calendar view is built using TUI calendar.

Institution-wide Settings and Adding Objects

The page for institution-wide settings has been re-designed to make it easier navigatable. The table of contents is now always visible, and the section “links to the institution elsewhere on the web” has been moved to the institution page.

There however are also some new options on the page. On the one hand, users can now enable or disable the image categorization when uploading images directly when adding new objects (the image recognition is render blocking and often hurts performance more than it actually benefits the inventorization). On the other, it is now possible to add additional fields to be directly accessible upon adding new objects and to make these required. It thus, for example, becomes possible to require a location to be provided before it can be recorded in the system altogether.

Watch list

The watch list feature has been completely re-implemented. The watch list is now generated completely in the browser using easily cache-able data retrieved from APIs. This, first of all, makes the watch list much faster to load and much less of a burden on the server side.

But the new watch list also comes with some new features:

• Users can now have multiple watch lists on the server
• Users can share their currently active watch list with other users of the same museum
• It is now possible to search objects by a watch list (or transfer the watch list into a search result). Thus, all batch editing and export functions available for object search results are now also available for watch lists. Obviously, this also allows for the watch list’s objects to be filtered by their place, collection, etc.
• Objects can now be added to the watch list in bulk.

Object search

The map view of object search results now updates the URL with positions and zoom factor when one browses the map. One can thus share a link to the exact same position one is currently viewing to one’s colleagues.

API

The API can now be used to delete objects.

Design

Error messages are now visible for four seconds as opposed to the regular 2.4 seconds other feedback messages on inputs are visible.

Frontend

Similar to the referencable maps of object search results in musdb, “objects on a map” maps in the frontend are now also referencable. We have also added a legend of event types on the same map.

museum-digital.org

museum-digital.org, the general website introducing museum-digital, has been reworked on a new technical basis. It is now statically generated once a day, reducing server costs and increasing performance. There are also many new texts, some new features (such as FAQs) and banner pictures that make the page more attractive.

The contents of the page are licensed under CC BY 4.0 International and can be edited on GitHub (See the repositories for the English version of the site and the German version).

Importer

The parser for importing images by their file names now offers a setting option to mark a certain part of a file name as an indicator to import the given image file as a hidden / non-public image.

Image: Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.