Happy Halloween!! Is it just me or did this month fly by, and I don't mean on a broomstick.
It feels like this month has involved a lot of running around, but when I look back at my day planner it really hasn't. There have been a few fun meetings with colleagues, lots of planning discussions, and general office busy-ness. I also took a few days off this month in order to use up some overtime, which is probably why it feels like I've been running in circles. I must have accomplished something this month though because the to do list is now down to 18.5 pages. But there are still outstanding items from summer travels and other adventures. Thank you for being so patient as I continue to work through the list.
Membership Renewal
Once again, there are still a few museums who have yet to send in their renewal contract & payment. We hate to keep pestering, but this has to be settled. So again, here are your tips on how to get this done:
1. Complete and send in your contract. Make sure that it is signed by two different people: the President of the Board of Directors and the primary Advisory Service contact person. We won't accept the contract unless it has two different signatures on it.
2. Send us a cheque for $350. $50 covers your regular ANSM membership and $300 covers the Advisory Service. Remember that in your renewal package there was a cost analysis of all the services delivered.
Collections Database Info
This weekend we will be rolling out a system update that I'm pretty excited about. We've chatted about it and debated it and it's finally coming to fruition - you'll be able to browse through for errors and problems and the system will give you a to do list of these items for fixing. I'm really excited about this and have a full blog post ready to go that explains the features. I really hope people will find it helpful.
As for database review work, finally, after months of slow progress, I can happily report that I finished up 5,755 database records in October. There are still a few databases left to review, but it feels great to have finished another one. It also feels good to see that people continue to steadily use the database in the off season. Another 228 artifacts and 355 images were entered into the systems which gives us grand totals of 216,554 artifacts and 88,695 images. We have over 37,000 items georeferenced and over 2,600 linked to Made in NS profiles. Slowly but surely, we are making some fantastic new connections between museum collections.
Regionally:
Southwest - 118,804 artifacts, 38,867 images
Central - 40,907 artifacts, 19,977 images
Northeast - 30,231 artifacts, 20,103 images
Congrats to the Northeast region this month for adding the most records and to the Southwest region for adding the most images. Keep up the great work!
NovaMuse Updates
We made a couple little updates to NovaMuse this month.
The first was that we finally added the Browse by Culture option. We've been talking about this one for a long time, but before it could be released we had to review the data. For some odd reason, people were including all sorts of things in the culture field instead of just saying that an artifact was Acadian or Scottish or French or whatever. It's still not perfect, but it's a lot better than it was. And hopefully people will be more mindful of this field since it is now featured more prominently online.
We also added a new disclaimer to the website, appearing on every single detail page. This is part of our watermarking update work. While we have this same information on the Terms of Use page, we decided it would be a good idea to keep it front and centre for our online visitors. We know how hard museums work in order to make information accessible and want to make sure that credit is given where credit is due.All for now. Have fun tonight and remember to play safe!
