State of Dev, December 2024 & January 2025
Once again a simple change log of the recent updates to museum-digital’s different tools.
New Features
Development Frontend Importer musdb nodac
Batch editing Change log Controlled Vocabularies Imports New Features TEI Version control
A Concordance Checker for Preparing Imports to museum-digital
When one runs an import to museum-digital – specifically one focused on internal collection management data – there is a chance to encounter errors of unmatched entries. The import tool identified that one tried to import a yet unknown value to what is a controlled field in musdb. Common issues appear especially with actor roles …
Version Control & Batch Transfer Between Data Fields of Object Records
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 …
State of Development, November 2024: “Real” separated Measurements and a Better Recognition of Tags, Places, etc.
A short overview in list form of the recent technical updates around museum-digital, as of November 2024.
Reconciliation APIs arrive to museum-digital
Imagine you have a spreadsheet with potentially unclean data or data that is not confirmed to be interoperable. A museum may want to migrate their data to a different system or share it with an aggregator or a researcher may want to analyze data from different museums where each has their own thesaurus. To make …
Who is actually using musdb? And what for?
In its most recently published survey of museums in Germany the Institute for Museum Research (Berlin) asked how many museums use controlled vocabularies and norm data. 416 of the 3059 museums who answered the additional question sheet with this particular question answered that they do indeed use norm data. The survey concerns German museums as …
Automatically enforcing consistent naming of places
Last week I wrote about how new actors find their way into museum-digital’s controlled vocabulary for actors during imports. One of the first steps detailed in the post is the automatic cleanup of the actor’s name and the application of some rules to ensure a consistent naming of actors. For time names a much more …
Quality Assessments Like in musdb: Now For Everybody
At yesterday’s Autumn Conference of the Working Group Documentation of the German Museum Association (Herbsttagung der Fachgruppe Dokumentation des Deutschen Museumsbunds) a new web service in the broader realm of museum-digital was released: museum-digital:qa. museum-digital:qa reuses the importer‘s relevant functionalities to accept museum object data in a variety of input formats – both open standards …
API documentation for frontend and md:term
md:term was designed to provide an API first and foremost. The frontend supported a full API providing to all access that the HTML version does since about 2016. We never got around to fully and systematically document the APIs however. Starting today, an OpenAPI documentation is available for both md:term and the frontend of museum-digital. …
Improved Workflow for Working with Loan Objects using EODEM
For some months, musdb has supported the upcoming EODEM standard for exchanging object information in the context of loans. The developments were covered extensively in a previous blog post. To summarize, the EODEM standard holds significant potential for saving registrars or colleagues taking over similar tasks in a museum a lot of time by providing …
Categorizing an object’s tags
… or “musdb finally supports materials, techniques, etc. from controlled vocabularies”. At museum-digital, there are four main centrally controlled vocabularies – actors, places, times, and tags. In more traditional collection management software however, the main field to control is usually the object type (is the object a helmet or a painting?). Simple tagging of the …
Summary of the monthly user meetup (March 2023)
Yesterday, we held our regular user meetup as scheduled. As promised, below you can find an overview of the new features and updates below some more general points. 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 …
A Calendar is a Commitment
Last year, we started a monthly user meet-up. As things go, we managed to continue the series at a stable time slot for some months – and then we did not anymore. People’s calendars are of course an issue, but another major one was simply that there were no consistently pre-determined meeting URLs. Over the …
Analyzing and Evaluating Collection Data in musdb
A general benefit of using computer systems is – or should be – that data once recorded can be retrieved and reused in different contexts than originally intended and retrieval and reuse are incredibly easy to do when compared to the physical realm. And thus comes the want for ever more pervasive and broad evaluation …
A Timeline for an Object’s History Within the Museum
In musdb, there’s PuQi, indicating aspects of an object that may be better or more extensively recorded for publication. There’s “Plausi“, indicating implausibilities in an object’s recorded events (e.g. if the object was supposedly created by somebody who was clearly not alive anymore at the time of creation entered in the object record). There are …
Shipments and Acquisitions in musdb
In one transaction, a museum buys 50 objects at an auction price for 3600 Euro. What is the price of a single one of the objects in the transaction? 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 …
Upcoming Major Update to musdb
Usually the development of musdb (and the other parts of museum-digital software) follows a rolling release paradigm. A new feature is developed, tested, and then distributed. Updates are – usually – not held back. Over the last month, we made an exception, as there will be a lot of new features and a slight redesign …
New Features at museum-digital (November 2022)
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 …
Monthly museum-digital user meetup (September 2022) / New Features
On September 6th 2022, we continued our monthly user meetups. As should best become the norm, we discussed recent new features of the preceeding month and plan a next meetup on the first Tuesday of October (October 4th, 2022, 5 p.m. at https://meet.jit.si/museum-digital-meetup-202210). A summary of the new features and updates can be found in …
Strict Modes
In my collection management system, I want to be able to see which objects have newly been acquired by the museum on a given day. Or on any day of a given month. Obviously. In musdb, the former was possible if imperfect thus far. The latter was not possible at all. This is because data …