• A Kannada translation of the software is now available
• Museums can now select to display their own citation notes in the menu for such on object pages
  This is especially relevant in case the object itself is to be cited (rather than its record online).
• “Or” search queries can be combined within one search parameter for select attribute search types, e.g. places and tags. The Syntax is as follows: place:61~1
  • For now, this can only be used using the internal query language. As such, there is no corresponding option in the UI for search settings. On the other hand, the search option is thus available using the API.
  • This option is not available when searching for times or full events

musdb

• Institution-wide settings
  • Free text fields that double with similar controlled fields may now be hidden
    • The acquisition of an object may e.g. be directly recorded on the context of a given object or as a separate acquisition process. Recording it as an acquisition process is slightly more labor-intensive, but allows a more fine-grained and accurate documentation. With the new setting, the data fields for recording acquisitions directly in the object context can be hidden from all users of a museum to ensure a uniform use of the preferred functionality.
    • Institution-specific notes on how to cite objects may now be recorded for display on published object pages.
• Search queries for inventory numbers are now character-level searches again (rather than following a fulltext search logic)
• Some event types are incomplete, i.e. they cannot contain a place, or an actor, or a time. This incompleteness was handled differently between musdb, the import tool, and the CSVXML import preparation tool. Now, it is determined by a centralized list and thus similar across all of museum-digital.
• Refactoring of the administrative command line interface
  This mainly concerns auto-correction tools, but also results in that exports for the quick export option are now automatically generated daily.
  
• Separated measurements are now positioned at the very top of the “addendum” tab of object editing pages.
• It is now possible to record web links for object groups

Importer

• The import tool can now be used as a harvester
  • First use case is a harvester for LIDO records delivered via an OAI-PMH interface.
• Externally stored images in formats other than JPG can now be imported
• Significantly extended the LIDO parser to (among others) support the import of multilingual object data

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Coming from that basic idea, there is now a second use case for museum-digital:qa: It is now capable of being used as a conversion tool. As usual, most formats supported for imports to museum-digital can be used to upload data – e.g. a simple CSV structure we regularly use for importing data previously held in table calculation programs – that is then converted to those XML formats to which users can export their object data in musdb (again recycling code from there).

At the moment conversions to LIDO (both versions 1.0 and 1.1) and EODEM are supported. Especially the latter may prove interesting: EODEM is a very recent extension of LIDO aimed at enabling a much simplified data exchange between different institutions in the context of loans. The lending museum exports the relevant objects’ data from their collection management system in EODEM; the borrowing institution then imports it and immediately has all the relevant information in their respective collection management system without having to manually re-type the data as has been usual for the last years. EODEMs utility in practice however depends on how widely it will be supported by the different collection management systems.

By offering a conversion option from different formats to EODEM, museum-digital:qa may thus help to make the benefits of EODEM available also to those museums whose collection management software does not yet support exports to the standard.

Image: Bell Telelphone crew with a dog, ca. 1892

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museum-digital:musdb has supported EODEM since February. But the usefulness of a standard is determined by how widely it is adopted. Thankfully, there is now a second collection management system to implement EODEM: Zetcom’s museumPlus.

You can learn more about EODEM on the project’s website. See also the very insightful notes from the project’s co-coordinator Rupert Shepherd.