Over the weekend, we have added a new feature to the project page, www.museum-digital.org: a calendar for trainings, meetings, and the like. The events for this calendar are pulled from various shared calendars via the respective iCalendar files and compiled into lists of the upcoming events.

While the primary source for events thus far is the calendar compiled by the German association for museum-digital, the museum-digital e.V., it also includes events in English. We can thus schedule the meetings ahead of time with meeting URLs set ahead of time without having to write a blog post every time. On the other hand, (publicly) scheduled events will be kept for sure.

And thus, publishing the calendar also means that this time around, we will surely do better and continue the series of monthly user meet-ups on every Tuesday of a month, 5 to 7 p.m. consistently for longer than we did last year.

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A summary of the new features and updates can be found in the following.

Recent Updates and New Features

musdb

Support for Imperial Measurement Units for Separated Measurements

Thus far, musdb only supported metric units for length, width, diameter, etc. It is now also possible to enter measurements in inches and feet. For searching objects smaller or larger than a given number, the number is still expected to be provided in millimeters.

Reworked Institution-Wide Settings Page

Certainly the main focus of our work on improving musdb has been a rather extensive overhaul of the institution-wide settings page. This page is available for users of the user role “museum director” and can be reached through the academy-icon in the navigation.

With the batch of updates, the page gets a new design with an always visible table of contents and rather extensive descriptions of each of the available settings. We removed some outdated and confusing options while adding new ones for the newly added strict modes and inventory number suggestions.

Suggestions for Inventory Numbers for New Objects

On the institution-wide settings page, it is now possible to set a scheme for how the museum forms its inventory numbers. Variable parts are expressed using placeholders:

• {no} for a number counting up. For a counter padded to a given number of digits, a number may be added after the place holder (e.g. {no}6 for a 6 digit counter in the inventory number.
• {c_sig} for a signature of the collection
• {year} for the ongoing calendar year).

If a regular inventory number in the house is, say, “2022-000025”, the scheme would thus be {year}-{no}6.

If an inventory number scheme has been set, an additional suggestion button will appear in front of the entry field for inventory numbers on the page for adding new objects.

Searching for Objects by Their Entry Dates

Similar to how secondary search indexes for measurements greater or smaller than a given value have existed for some time, entry dates, estimation dates, etc. are now made properly searchable through the object search in musdb. For this, dates need to be set in a coherent, maschine-readable form that is greatly aided by the new strict modes.

Strict Modes

See the dedicated blog post on this topic.

Deletion Buttons in the Toolbar of Entry Pages

If one wanted to delete an object group, one thus far needed to find the object group in the object group overview and delete it from there. There was no option to delete it right from the page of the object group itself.

For a more straight-forward control, we now added deletion buttons on the editing pages of object groups, exhibitions, etc. These deletion buttons can be found in the toolbar on the right of the screen.

PNG Supported When Uploading Object Images

Since object images are almost always photos or scans that feature a multitude of colors and few solid blocks of color, JPG is a much better format than PNG for storing (compressed) object images. musdb hence only accepted JPG images for uploads thus far. Since some museums however have internal rules for keeping their object images’ working copies in PNG, we now allow PNG uploads and then convert the PNG images to JPG during the upload process.

Frontend

License Descriptions Consistently Displayed on Object Pages

Until last month, a description of the metadata license of an object page (to be found at the bottom of the page) was only available for the license CC BY-NC-SA. We now removed the exception and made descriptions and links to the license text available for all available licenses.

Importer

• Improved documentation
• Further modularize parsers
• Added new parsers for EasyDB (work in progress)
• Allow importing images by their URLs to locally hosted ones

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.

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The meetings will take place next week on Tuesday, and following that on every first Tuesday of a month, at 5 p.m. and are open to anybody interested in museum-digital. Generally, we will have a very rough agenda, where we will first discuss the updates and new features of the last month in museum-digital’s tools and then open up the meeting for general discussion and questions and answers. A short summary of the most recent features will be published here on the blog.

The first meeting will take place on Tuesday, August 9th, 2022, at https://meet.jit.si/museum-digital-meetup-202208.

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