State of Development, October 2025
A summary of recent updates and development around museum-digital in October 2025.
New Features
Community Development Dissemination Frontend musdb Presentations
New Features Object search (frontend) User interface
State of Dev, September 2025
Recent (technical) development around museum-digital in September 2025.
State of Dev, August 2025
A summary of the recent updates and (technical) development around museum-digital in August 2025.
Making Interoperability Easy
Interoperability has been one of the focal issues around museum-digital practically since its inception. Offering different, simple ways to bring data into the system was a necessary requirement to even think of what we do. And offering simple ways to get the data out of the system again is just good practice – though all …
State of Dev, June & July 2025
June and especially July were at first glance once again rather slow months in terms of development at museum-digital. Generally, the pace and type of development seems to have changed this year. Rather than doing many small improvements all over the place, there is less but larger and more labor intensive changes and new features. …
State of Dev, May 2025
An overview about recent developments around museum-digital in May 2025.
State of Dev, March & April 2025
Frontend musdb Importer
Bringing back character-driven search for inventory numbers in musdb
If you search for “run”, you want to find entries (objects, blog posts, etc.), that mention “ran”. If you search for inventory numbers like “*1”, you want to find “0001”. These are fundamentally different categories of search. In the first case, you want to have a language-aware full-text search. In the latter case, you simply …
State of Dev, February 2025
In terms of development happening around museum-digital, February 2025 was a rather calm month. While more happened in the “machine room”, immediately visible changes are mostly restricted to bugfixes. And a whole new tool.
Sort by Beauty
Last month a new sort option appeared on museum-digital: “Aesthetics prediction”. Thoughts on AI, beauty, and the discriminating nature of sorting.
State of Dev, December 2024 & January 2025
Once again a simple change log of the recent updates to museum-digital’s different tools.
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 …