June 2009 Update

Site Visits

Karin has been on the road for most of June, visiting 18 sites in total and rotating travel among the 4 regions. So far people have been very pleased with the database upgrade and other new services being introduced. Due to the positive reception of the game plan, it has been posted to the blog so that everyone can take advantage of it right away.

Here’s what people are saying about it:

· This will be a great way to keep my summer students on track

· I’ll be showing this to CMAP during my evaluation as our plan for working with the database

· After two weeks, I finished the first two steps and had everything online. I can’t believe it!

Data Cleaning (aka Lynn’s work)

June was a busy month in terms of providing support to all the opening sites and handling some other important tasks, which means that the data cleaning work was fairly slow. Still, 1329 records were cleaned for one site.

Data Entry Support (aka Melanie’s work)

Melanie is still working away on Queen’s County Museum’s records, and is about 1/3 of the way through. With the new duplicate record button in the database, her rate of progress is increasing.

Do you have a backlog of paper records to be entered in your database? Could you use some extra assistance getting through it? If you’re interested in receiving this support please follow the call for proposals that was sent out last week and send it to Karin. This does not have to be a formal application; you just have to prove that you could use some help. If you no longer have the call for proposals document, let Karin know and she can send it off to you.

Artefacts Canada Tally

With seasonal sites now open and following the new Passage game plan, we are expecting to see a big increase in uploading over the summer months. This month 7,979 records went online, which gives us a grand total of 86,774 records on Artefacts Canada.

Here are the current regional standings:

Central: 27,666

Southwest: 25,092

Northeast: 19,969

Cape Breton: 14,047

Congratulations to Cape Breton for uploading the most records this month. They almost doubled their former tally!

Passage in the Community

On June 20^th Karin, Lynn, Paul Collins of the Nova Scotia Museum and Aidan Norton, newly appointed Curator of the Colchester Historical Museum attended the grand opening of the recently renovated Creamery Square Heritage Centre in Tatamagouche. The event was well attended by the local community, members of the Nova Scotia museum community as well as several special guests, including MP Peter MacKay. Visitors were invited to tour the exhibition space which provides an attractive and thoughtful history of the Tatamagouche area and its people. The onsite farmers market was also open for business, providing visitors with a wide selection of local food, wine, music and crafts. We encourage everyone to visit Tatamagouche and experience this unique sample of Nova Scotian heritage.

Blog Polls

Results are in from the past poll, which asked how many artifacts are in your collections.

1. 7 people said 1 - 3,000
2. 7 people said 3,001 - 7,000
3. 4 people said 7,001 – 15,000
4. 3 people said 15,001 – 25,000

The new poll is up, and for this one we want to know who is doing the most work in your database, entering new records, updating old records etc. You can choose staff, volunteers, students, or a combination of these three. I encourage all of you to participate in this poll as it really helps the Steering Committee gain a clearer picture of the museum community and provides insight into how we can help you.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the poll.