May 2019 Update

Conferences & Meetings
The first conference of the month was the annual one of the Council of Nova Scotia Archives, where Sandi presented on our SME work and encouraged attendees to engage with local experts to learn more about their collections. It was great to hear about non-traditional uses and approaches to archival collection issues, and how the information in them is becoming more and more accessible. I (Karin) somehow missed getting a photo of her in action, so here she is all ready to talk up the amazing work by David, Marven and Kassandra.

I spent this week running from one conference to another. The Canadian Evaluation Society was in Halifax for its annual conference, which afforded an opportunity to learn more about broader evaluation practices and issues. I attended workshops and sessions on communication strategies for transforming results into action, evaluator integrity, community-led evaluation practices, decision-making and its impact on the evaluation process, and using results to form strategic plans. I have a lot of notes, takeaways, and information to process. It was great to delve deeper into the  evaluation world and get input on the Museum Evaluation Program from professional evaluators.

The second conference of the week was the Canadian Association for Conservation of Cultural Property, which is still taking place today and tomorrow. It's been a few years since I've attended the CAC conference, and it was great to see some old friends, colleagues, and even two of my teachers. What made this conference especially special, was that I had the honour of delivering the opening keynote. Not only was this a huge compliment, but it was exciting to share the amazing work of our member museums with a national audience. I was asked to speak on how community museums address collections care issues, and thanks to all of the great community museums we work with, had plenty of examples to share. The next session of the conference focused on conservation projects in Nova Scotia, so by lunch time the attendees had a pretty solid understanding of the scope of work being done in our wonderful province.

Museum Evaluation Program
May 3rd, aka the deadline for Documentation Review, came and went. This year felt pretty smooth since most museums uploaded their files gradually and well in advance of the deadline. So where are we at now? While museums shift gears to prepare for the July site evaluation, we at ANSM are reviewing and scoring the Doc Review files. Unfortunately, not everyone cleaned up their 2016 submitted files, so the MEP Working Group is now debating how to address this issue in the future. As you can imagine, this makes the review process much more difficult and lengthy. So while we had great intentions and thought this would make things easier, we'll have to figure out a better process for next year.
The working group is also tackling question review for 2020 and policies and procedures for Accreditation. They are a very busy group. We had one virtual meeting this month and what felt like a million emails and discussion threads in the Google group.

CollectiveAccess Updates
There are now 298,523 artifacts documents with 185,995 associated images, which means that 286 new records and 1,496 new images have been added to CollectiveAccess this month. The Southwest region added the most images this month. Great work!

Here's what the numbers look like at the regional level:
Southwest - 133,567 artifacts, 71,849 images
Central - 100,955 artifacts, 54,155 images
Northeast - 33,691 artifacts, 43,862 images
Cape Breton - 30,310 artifacts, 16,129 images

A number of new tutorials have been added to our YouTube channel to review new features in the database, please visit the CollectiveAccess tutorials playlist. Topics include:

Exporting Records to Artefacts Canada
Using the Nomenclature Website
Adding Child Records (New & Existing Records)
Using Change Log
Help Menu

Other important resources to share with your team:
CollectiveAccess Manual
NovaMuse Stories Guide
Artefact Photography Tips
QR Code How-To Guide

Fleming College
Hot off the press, we are super excited to announce that an intern from Fleming's Cultural Heritage Conservation and Management program will be joining us this Fall. As part of her internship, she will be surveying museums to see what media formats are in collections, so put on your thinking caps and be ready to answer her questions about this in September. Do you have cassette tapes of oral histories sitting on shelves? Film reels or vhs tapes of old family movies? She will want to hear about it.

Artefacts Canada
As we've been mentioning, before there was NovaMuse, we shared collections info on Artefacts Canada. Over the past month we have asking permission to refresh the old 2011 records with the latest records from NovaMuse. So far, we've added 25,000 records and 30,000 images. If you haven't yet responded to a request to refresh your collections info on AC, please do so. If you haven't yet heard from us, you will soon. Or you can be proactive and reach out to us first. Our plan is to refresh AC twice a year, once in the Spring and once in the Fall, until their website renewal process is complete and we will be able to share automatically between the two sites.

Old Loans
While we still haven't wrapped up the new Loan Reconciliation Toolkit, we can still be working on prepping lender lists in anticipation of this new resource. If you haven't asked us for your lender list yet, email Sandi or Karin, even if you think you don't have many loans in the museum. We hear that a lot and when we actually look into the records, they sometimes reveal a very different reality.

Site Visits
The schedules have been released, please check your email for updates. Hub training is the perfect opportunity for staff, summer students, and volunteers to take part in group digitization training. This year, there will be a focus on digitizing 2-dimensional items with connections to manufacturing and makers in Nova Scotia, further enhancing connections to Made in Nova Scotia. Spots tend to fill up quickly so please email Sandi (advisory@ansm.ns.ca) as soon as possible to express interest in participating!

Admiral Digby Museum (Digby, NS) - Wed., June 5th 1 PM
Scott Manor House (Bedford, NS) - Tues., June 18th 9:30 AM
Port Hastings Museum (Port Hastings, NS) - Thurs., July 18th 1 PM
Old Sydney Society (Charlotte Street, Sydney, NS) - Tues., August 13th 10 AM
Wallace and Area Museum (Wallace, NS) - Thurs., August 29th 9 AM
DesBrisay Museum (Bridgewater, NS) - Thurs., September 12th 9 AM

We still have openings for next week's session. Email Sandi ASAP to reserve a spot!

SME Update - we will work with a few returning SMEs this year who have been so kind to offer their expertise to further enrich records found in CollectiveAccess and on NovaMuse. We are excited to announce that we have received funding to improve the multimedia capacity of NovaMuse that will give us the opportunity to add a more robust narrative to records online. Our SMEs are great sports and will be the first to contribute to this enhanced feature.

Museum Moments - do you have tips you'd like to share regarding collections management? What about an event or special project you'd like to highlight? We'd love to hear and share your story in a featured blog post!

Membership Packages will be mailed out soon! Please keep an eye out. Questions? Please contact Jennifer (admin[at]ansm.ns.ca).