State of Dev, May 2025
An overview about recent developments around museum-digital in May 2025.
Object search (musdb)
Development Frontend Importer musdb nodac
API New Features Object search (musdb)
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 …
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, October 2024: Searching Objects Currently On Exhibition, Linking Location and Acquisition of Literature
After the blog has been very quiet this year with regard to the technical development of museum-digital, we are now trying to publish the summaries of new developments – enriched with screenshots – that are prepared for the monthly “regional administrators” rounds in Germany anyway. These are in the form of listings, and this is …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Monthly museum-digital user meetup (August 2022) / New features
On Tuesday last week we had our first international user meetup. As proposed, we mainly discussed recent updates and new features before opening up the general discussion. In the process, we also wrote a list of the new features introduced with short notes on each. You can find it below. The next monthly meetup is …
Referencable Maps in the Frontend and in musdb
Development on museum-digital will be concentrated on more internal functionalities in the next months, but some small improvements continue to be made in the public frontend. Like today: We have now implemented the option to directly link to a position on a map view for object search results both in the frontend and in musdb. …
OpenSearch: Search museum-digital directly from the browser’s search bar
OpenSearch is an open web standard for describing search functions of web services. If a website supports it, the browser will take note and offer the user to install the website as a search machine. One especially nice aspect of it is, that OpenSearch can be implemented in just a few lines of code. It …
“Select all” in Object Selection Mode in musdb
While most of the weekend had us preoccupied with doing a long-thought-over plan, we managed to squeeze in a minor improvement of the object selection mode in musdb: A “select all” option similar to how – for example – all files are selected in the Windows Explorer. To use it, press <CTRL+a> while in the …