Similarly located in the sidebar of the object editing page, musdb now features a timeline for all time-based information of an object. Primarily focused on providing an overview over said time-based information and hinting at less prominent data points like conservation / restoration measures and loans in the history, this new feature has proven to be located just right. Provenance researchers now use it to find blank spots in the object history that are to be further identified.

How to Use the Timeline?

A preview of the timeline is always visible in the sidebar of the object editing page in musdb, displayed as a simple line with colored indicators for any event, shipment, etc. that has been recorded as happening to the object.

By clicking on the timeline’s preview, the timeline opens in a full screen overlay, which shows the timeline in its full form – with markers for the year of the earliest and latest entry on the timeline (the end of the timeline is always the current year, unless a date in the future has been set for the object [e.g. the copyright expiration date]). Above and below each indicator for something taking place, there’s now also a textual representation of the type of event taking place.

Below the timeline, there is a table presenting the same information in a more orderly fashion. Hovering over an entry in the table highlights the same entry’s representation in the timeline and vice versa. A left click on the entry opens the object page at the respective position, so that one can easily access detailed information about the data point represented.

Finally, the overlay features two date pickers at the very top right. These represent the earliest and latest displayed date in the timeline and table. By updating the dates in these respective fields, one can “zoom” into the selected timespan.
This “zoom” may especially be useful if one works with very old objects like roman coins, whose history is largely unknown between their well-recorded minting and the entry to the museum. In such cases, the timeline may have many entries at its very start and its very end with a large blank spot of 2000 years in between. By appropriately scaling the timeline however, all events that have taken place since the object entered the museum would be so close to each other that they would practically be indistinguishable in the timeline without the zoom feature.

What Can Be Seen on the Timeline?

Now, let’s recapitulate. What can the timeline display exactly? All time-based data points means that the following fields and concepts are displayed:

• Events
• Acquisition
• Reservations
• Checks (for completeness or condition)
• Damages
• Restoration and conservation measures
• Loans
• Shipments
• Exhibitions
• “Periods”: Date any copyright on the object expires, freeze period, scheduled end of deposit, etc.

Additionally, there are some fields that may or may not provide legible information to display. These fields are historically free text fields that are however meant for recording date informations and that can be converted into date fields by enabling the respective strict modes. musdb attempts to parse the information provided in these fields as date information as best as possible, and will display the data points if the extraction of date information was successful. A full date like 2022-01-02 clearly is no proble. A year like 2022 would be parsed to a time span from 2022-01-01 until 2022-12-31. But a statement like “At the start of 2022” is practically illegible and will be ignored in the timeline.
The fields thus displayable only if they contain legible information are:

• Estimation of value
• Determination of insurance value
• Time of first registration in the museum
• Time of entry to the museum (this same information can however be parsed clearly from shipments and acquisition if the respective dedicated modules are used)

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On the other hand, it’s a very clearly defined situation, that is repeated again and again in a very similar pattern. Which is to say, it is a perfect subject for automation.

Now, some years ago, a working group came together in the context of CIDOC to do exactly that. Since not all museums use the same collection management system, the necessary first step towards automating the exchange of object information was obviously to develop an open standard for the same, that could be implemented in the different collection management applications.

The standard thus developed – EODEM, short for Exhibition Object Digital Exchange Model – is now mature enough to have gone into a public beta release phase. We’re very, very late to the party, but it was time to try our hands on implementing an import and export for EODEM. The import had already been done by November, but by the time of the larger update and re-design of January, we also managed to release an EODEM export.

This blog post will continue explaining how to import and export EODEM data before closing on a general perspective on the usefulness of EODEM at this point in time and in the foreseeable future.

How to Use EODEM in musdb?

As with loans in general, there are two situations in which one might want to use EODEM. The receiving museum can save a lot of time by importing EODEM data, while the sending museum can help out colleagues by exporting it.

Importing EODEM data

In the (German language) handbook, one can read a lengthy explanation of how to import object data into musdb (a less extensive description can be found in the blog as well, this time in English). In short: One first needs to generate a password to access the import folder using a WebDAV client. After mounting the folder, one can proceed to upload the data. Finally, a configuration file needs to be written to enable the import tool to identify the format of the import data, a mail address which is to be notified when the import is done etc. As the server checks all museums’ import directories for available import data every four hours, the object information will then be automatically imported after some time.

EODEM was developed as an application profile for LIDO 1.1, meaning that it builds upon and extends the LIDO standard for exchanging object information. As such, we could simply integrate EODEM into our regular LIDO import. Hence, users who want to import EODEM data need to set the “parser” setting to “Lido” in the configuration file.

Depending on the way a museum forms its inventory numbers, EODEM however may present a problem regular LIDO imports do not. If an inventory number in the sending museum (say, in the import data) equals an inventory number of one of the receiving museum’s own objects, the importer would interpret the duplicate inventory number so as to update the existing record of the inventory number rather than adding a new one. In response to this problem, we added a new setting available in the LIDO parser: prefix_inventory_numbers . By entering a value (e.g. the reference number of the loan) to this setting, the given value will be prefixed to the imported inventory number so as to prevent collisions and allow importing objects safely.

Exporting EODEM data

EODEM data can be exported from musdb the same way any other XML export can be run. It is now listed as an additional export format in the regular export form. The export form is accessible either through the navigation for exporting the whole collection – which obviously makes little sense in the case of EODEM – or on the search results page once at least one search parameter is set. One can thus filter the collection for all objects of a given loan, click the export button in the sidebar, possibly adjust the list of exported fields (e.g. to exclude a field one does not actually want to export, but which is usually covered by the EODEM export). Finally, one will receive a ZIP file containing the EODEM-encoded object information. This ZIP can then be sent to the receiving museum.

To both promote and simplify the exchange of loan object information using EODEM, a shortcut has been added in the sidebar of loan editing pages. Clicking on “Objects (EODEM)” in the export section of the sidebar directly takes one to the EODEM export settings page for all objects of the given loan.

In musdb and Beyond

As stated above, we were very late to the party. EODEM has been in development for some years, but we only started seriously looking into it in late 2022 (all credit for developing EODEM thus goes to others; the working group deserves a lot of thanks!).

On the other hand, it turns out that musdb is the first collection management system to actually feature an EODEM import and export in production. For the time being, exchanging EODEM information thus mainly helps in the case of loans between two museums that both use musdb for collection management.

The working group’s page however provides a list of software vendors who plan to implement EODEM imports and / or exports. Many of the big names are already listed there, meaning that a timely implementation of the standard in many of the major collection management systems is almost given.

On the other hand, there are many, many more collection management systems than those ten listed at the time. While EODEM is based on LIDO and thus very simple to implement if a collection management system already features a LIDO import / export, it remains to be seen how many will eventually adopt the it. Hopefully it is many, so that we can improve interoperability and soon enough all save some time when working with loan objects.

Image credit: “Relief zweier sich die Hände reichenden Männer, Seebronn (?)“, CC BY-SA @ Landesmuseum Württemberg

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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 no choice but to make up the price or to not enter one at all.

This problem is now solved, as is the tracking of shipments. Both of these are completely new sections of musdb that can be linked to objects (and in the case of shipments, exhibitions and loans as well).

Acquisitions

To access the acquisitions section in musdb, one can use the theee dots symbol in the main navigation (at the very top of a page) or enable the link to this section using the personal settings (accessible by clicking on one’s name).

Entering, filtering and searching acquisitions works roughly analogous to what one would do when managing loans.

Importantly, acquisitions are linked to a source of previous owner of the acquisition and possibly a source for the funding required to actually acquire the objects. Both of these fields are controlled by the contacts list / address book.

On object editing pages, acquisition processes can be linked to the given object using the object administration tab. Here, “acquisition” is a newly available select fields right next to the older fields for the acquition date, price, and currency. Once an acquisition process has been linked, a preview of the acquisition process and – if available – a preview of the contact information of the previous owner / acquisition source are displayed right below the select field. These new previews are now also available if an owner of the object other than the museum itself has been entered by the way.

Shipments

Shipments can now be added, listed and tracked in a similar way to acquisitions. They, too, build a whole new section of musdb that can toggled into the shortcut navigation by way of the personal settings – or they can be accessed using the three dots symbol in the navigation at the very top right of the window.

While everything else in terms of adding, listing and updating shipments works roughly analogous to the management of acquisitions, shipments can be linked to objects via the object’s destination tab and they can be linked to exhibitions and loans. Hence, there are new tabs on the loans and exhibitions pages for listing the shipments linked to a given loan or exhibition.

Image credits: Kulturstiftung Sachsen-Anhalt – Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale): Frachtschiff im Hafen von Göteborg, CC BY-NC-SA, photographer: Hans Finsler.

musdb

New fields

Other page

Batch updating object information

Instituion-wide settings and adding new objects

Notifications

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

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.

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.