Batch editing | museum-digital: blog

State of Dev, December 2024 & January 2025

Joshua Ramon Enslin — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 23:48:42 +0000

December 2024

Frontend

Dates in TEI transcriptions are parsed, irrespective of whether when="" oder when='' was used
Notes for markings are now publicly displayed
This was missing thus far and is now implemented similar to how event notes are displayed. If a note exists, a small “[?]” appears behind the marking title line. Upon hovering over it, a tooltip appears with the relevant information.

musdb

Names and descriptions of exhibitions and object groups can now be translated
Version control
Log of “current locations” of an object can be exported as a CSV file
Uploaded object images can now be hidden or published in one batch operation
API extended
- (New functions)
- Transfer object dimensions
- List images and resources for an object
- Image metadata
- Publish / hide object images

January 2025

Frontend

Objects can now be sorted by the aesthetics of the thumbnail (A dedicated blog post on this will follow soon)

musdb

Batch transfer between between free text fields of object data
Alignment of the maximum field length for notes on opening hours is now consistent between UI and database
Bug fixed with switching between institutions during consistency checks fixed (relevant only to users with administrative access to multiple museums)
Literature can now be searched by editors

Importer

Core
- Automatic transformation of life dates for actors
  - Year of death “01.01.2012” now becomes “2012”, instead of 01.01 as before
- “?” and “(?)” are removed from the beginning and end of imported keywords
- Various types of brackets in keyword names are converted to regular brackets
Parser
- Stricter internal implementation of settings, all imports can now implement the start_at setting
  - This is particularly useful for the repeated execution of imports that abort due to new, previously uncovered elements and other debugging.
- New parsers:
  - MODS (mainly used in library contexts)
  - Parser for Exports from Faust for the Händel-Haus
  - Parser for XML dumps from MuseumPlus Classic (MsSQL > XML export per table > Import)
  - Bugfixes
    - Field “Verwender” in Primus parser was mapped to production events
    - Material / technology are now imported correctly in the parser for BeeCollect exports for the Industrial Museums of Saxony
„Frontend“
- CLI now also has options for switching off the import of individual areas
- Help text for command line tool

nodac

Splitting of keywords now also recognizes keywords that should be split into places, times, etc.
- Bsp.: „Helm; Berlin“ > Schlagwort „Helm“ + Ort „Berlin“
- Example: “helmet; Berlin” > keyword “helmet” + place “Berlin”
When searching for keywords with ambiguous names, both keywords and generally ambiguous terms are now taken into account
Times can now be merged with others directly from the time edit page

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

Version Control & Batch Transfer Between Data Fields of Object Records

Joshua Ramon Enslin — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 15:05:59 +0000

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 data records. For example to be able to trace and restore data after an attempt at batch processing gone wrong or careless errors when deleting field contents.

Such a view of all previous versions of an object record since the start of recording (May 2024) can now be accessed via the “record history” tab when viewing and editing an object in musdb. A new “Open versioning” button appears right at the top.

The detailed version history can be accessed via a new button at the top of the “record history” tab when editing an object.

Clicking on it opens an overlay in which the various versions are listed as a table. The various aspects of the object data set are divided into different tabs and therefore different tables, e.g. for basic information, administrative information, links to collections, keywords, etc.

The version history of an object is presented in a table view in the overlay. Cells whose values have changed in one version respective to the previous one are displayed with dashed borders. Empty cells are dashed sideways. In the screenshot, the most recent version can be seen at the top (empty cell in the column “end”). Between lines 2 and 3, the object description was significantly shortened, leading to a reduction in the quality index in the most recent version (top row).

Batch transfer

A second frequently requested feature – especially after importing – has been the option to transfer the content of one data field of object records to another. If, for example, the information previously stored in the non-publishable data field “object history” is to be stored in the “detailed description” in the future and published there, the transfer from one field to the other can now be carried out for hundreds of objects with the pressing of a few buttons. Like all other “Global Change” options, the batch transfer between different data fields always refers to the results of an object search. The function is available via the sidebar of the object overview once a search for objects has been executed.

If a search filter is set for objects, various options for export and batch processing appear in the bottom right of the sidebar. A new option “batch transfer” can be found at the very bottom of the list.

Screenshot of the new option for transferring object data in batches from one free text field to another. In addition to the free text fields for the object, the two “special sources” “separate dimensions” and “separate information: material and technology” can be selected, as shown in the screenshot. When transferring between data fields, the content of the target field can be overwritten with the content of the source data field, or the latter can be prepended or appended to the target field’s content.

The batch transfer between fields based search results can also be used via musdb’s API. For this, a new API route /object/transfer_by_search/{mode} has been added.

New Features at museum-digital (November 2022)

Joshua Ramon Enslin — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 16:59:27 +0000

After trying a monthly change log once some month ago, we have unfortunately been rather lenient with notifying everyone of new features and updates in the last months. To approach betterment, here there is a list of the updates of November 2022 the form of screenshots. As a very large update is upcoming in the next days, a separate post on the updates of December 2022 will follow tonight.

musdb

New fields

New section for time limits on administration tab of object pages. Special mention should go to the fields “Freeze period” and “Publish object at”. Filling out these fields enables some automation: A “frozen” object cannot be published before the entered date has been reached. This may e.g. be useful with archival material that cannot be published before a given date. The “Publish object at” field offers a counterpart to this. If a date has been entered into this field and the date is reached, the object will be published automatically by the system.

A non-public closer location for an object (which may e.g. be necessary with archeological findings, whose finding spots have no name and are not to be published to not give information to grave robbers) can now be set using a map on the addendum tab.

A number of new fields for noting conditions on how the object should best be displayed in exhibitions, among others, have been added on the “remarks” tab of object pages in musdb.

On the “restoration” tab of object pages, generic fields can be entered with the name of the described feature and the value. Because of the flexible subject of these fields however, they make searching in the fields much harder. Hence, new fields that are applicable to almost all museum objects have been added as easily searchable, “static” properties of an object: Minimum and maximum viable temperature, minimum and maximum viable humidity, and the maximum lux an object may be exposed to.

Other page

It is quite common for users of musdb to only use the same some event types all the time, while not needing many of the other available event types. People working at archeological museums will likely need the “found” event type all the time, while barely ever using the event type “copied by hand”. To directly access those often used types, one can now click the “star” symbols at the end of a line for an event type when accessing the page for selecting the event type of a new event. Favorited event types will then be listed in a bottom sheet on the page.

Batch updating object information

The batch update menu for objects’ visibility can now also be used to set the visibility of publishable fields that are publishable on a field level.

The “batch assignment” menu can now be used to assign spaces, owners, linked loans, and full events (e.g. the creation of objects by a given artist at a given time) to all objects of a search results list.

A “smaller” way of batch updating objects can be used in the object overview by selecting an object by clicking and dragging an object. Now, objects can be selected and updated in bulk. The menu for doing these updates (visible here at the top of the screenshot) now comes with an additional option: “Open in new tab”. By clicking on this menu option, all selected objects are opened in new tabs. As browsers often prevent the opening of multiple tabs in bulk, one may have to allow the opening of pop-ups for musdb in the browser to use this functionality.

Instituion-wide settings and adding new objects

The download button for images in the frontend has been repurposed to enable bulk downloading of all images of an object. While the images are downloaded, the users see an overlay where the museum may display a message (e.g. on how to use the images, or for asking the users to notify the museum about the images being reused in print). The message can be set in the institution-wide settings (available for users of the role “museum director” by hovering over the academy symbol in the navigation in musdb and then selecting the menu option “settings”).

The instituion-wide settings page now also comes with two other new features. On the one hand, users can now be required to select a tag for the object type when adding new objects. On the other, the inventory number suggestion when adding new objects has been improved. It is now possible to generate inventory numbers with variable length numerical components (e.g. ABC-9; followed by ABC-10).

Notifications

The notification framework in musdb has been fully rewritten. Along with that comes the option to specifically subscribe to email notifications only for some types of notifications. To do so, one can navigate to one’s personal settings. A new tab “notifications” on this page allows setting the primary route of notification and a fallback. If the primary route is set to “email” for upcoming ends to loans, the user will immediately receive a mail once the system recognizes an upcoming end to a loan. If the primary route here is set to “Internal” and “Email” is set to be the fallback route, the user will only see a notification on the upcoming loan in the notification overlay within musdb for a week. If the notification has not been marked as read after a week, a mail will be sent.

In other news

The calendar feature (accessible under the puzzle symbol in the main navigation) can now display tasks or make them subscribable via WebCal (thus implementing a “reminder” as had often been requested)
PDF of all linked information is now in A4 and uses a two-column layout
Ukrainian translation
“Simple A5 PDF” now covers inventorization fields on rear side

md:term

If two actors have been joined and one has an old links to the page of the actor now deleted, one is now referred onwards to the new, single actor entry. The same works with transferrals between vocabularies (an actor that was transformed into a tag, etc.).
Ukrainian Translation

md:term is now available in Ukrainian!

Frontend

Ukrainian Translation
JSON-based settings for specific institution pages have been removed
Bulk download of object images
- An overlay with a message from the museum can be displayed during batch downloads (see above)

CSVXML

Almost completely rewritten
The served page now is completely static and all checks and conversions run directly in the browser. This way, no uploads actually happen and the application is completely uncritical to the server’s security. On the other hand, this allows for installing CSVXML as a progressive web app and using it offline.
We also added some explanatory texts did small updates to the design of the page. A footer now links to the source code and offers to refresh all cached contents of the page (this may be useful when visiting the page after a long time, as the whole application is cached in the browser for offline use).
A new check also checks for the file encoding. A warning is provided if the data does not appear to be UTF-8-encoded.
CSVXML is now released open source under the AGPL.

CSVXML has been (almost) completely rewritten).

Importer

While the individual parsers for the different export formats are updated very often, the core scripts of the importer are very stable. November 2022 however came with a large update to these core sections, as more categories of data that had not before been covered by the importer (many of them new) can now be imported:

Contact information (e.g. for object owners; loan partner institution)
Object’s movement log
Minimum and maximum temperature, humidity, and lux of an object
Loans
Events / Appointments

In terms of the parsers, we extended the LIDO parser to cover the new fields suggested by the upcoming EODEM standard for exchanging loan object information.