January 2019 Update

Museum Evaluation Program
As always, the MEP is in full swing. This month we opened the Documentation Review submission website, and are excited to report that museums are now are able to login and review their previous evaluation submission and just update what needs to be updated rather than having to resubmit everything. We are hoping this saves everyone a lot of time, effort, and stress. For those of you that are actively preparing for evaluation, a few things to keep in mind:
- museums that regularly reach out for support score on average 11% higher than those that do not,
- museums that engage in regular learning opportunities score on average 20% higher than those that do not,
- and museums that prepare for evaluation as a team score on average 21% higher than those that rely on one person to do all the work.
Please don't wait until April or May to get started on prep work. It's a lot, and we're here to help, but the sooner you reach out, the easier it is to provide that help.
We are also accepting applications from people who want to serve as evaluators. If you or someone you know is interested in applying, they can check out the program info, evaluator job description application form on our website. Last year our 11 evaluators had a combined 356 years of experience. Isn't that crazy?? It really speaks to the lifelong dedication of heritage professionals.

The Working Group (MEPWG) that supports the MEP met this month, and mostly talked about how we're going to evolve the MEP into into an accreditation program. They decided to strike a smaller group to really dive into some policies and procedures and that's what we are doing now. Lots of stuff in draft form, and lots of discussions taking place.

CollectiveAccess Updates
We have some really interesting conversations with museum workers and we are privileged to help museums with their database work. Both of these scenarios lead to discoveries of challenges facing museums, and legacy issues from previous generations of workers. And for some odd reason, we often see/hear about the same things in rapid succession...it's like the old adage that things happen in threes. So here are the latest three things to surface:

1. Original owners. When tagging someone as the original owner of an artifact, it's really important to think about what this is telling the world. The person you tagged was the first owner of that item. Here's a perfect example of how this can go wrong. Someone tagged a Nova Scotian man as the original owner of a Nazi armband. You know the ones I mean; bright red with the white circle and black swastika. What you are saying is that this local man was a Nazi. The museum worker who entered this information into the database tagged the donor, who brought back this souvenir from the Second World War, as its original owner. This is a really bad mistake to broadcast, an ugly accusation to make, and definitely not an apology you want to give to that individual or their family. 

2. Permanent loans! It's an oldie that we've blogged about and developed a resource to help with, but it just keeps rearing its ugly head. And the longer the issue is avoided, the higher the risk for museums. It is much easier to deal with one person to clear up loans than a grieving family. So we are offering to be more proactive in our support of museums with these old loans in their collections. If you are using CollectiveAccess and want some help, we will create reports for you by lender so that you can easily see who needs to be approached about which items. Just give us a call or send us an email and let us know you'd like us to do this for your museum. 

3. Tying into the permanent loan issue is capturing full contact information for donors and lenders. Your database should be your go-to for information. Did someone donate 300 items and the prospect of updating all those records is daunting?? No worries! Just click on the person's name, enter all their details and contact info, hit save, and then it gets transferred to every object record to which it is linked. You just updated 300 records in one minute, and now when you need to call someone to talk about their old loans, you've got their phone number at your fingertips.

There are now 297,563 artifacts documented with 178,768 associated images, which means that 88 new records and 930 new images have been added to CollectiveAccess this month. Congrats to the Central region for adding the most images this month!

Here's what the numbers look like at the regional level:

Southwest -133,337 artifacts, 67,711 images

Central - 100,438 artifacts, 51,345 images

Northeast - 33,613 artifacts, 43,608 images

Cape Breton - 30,175 artifacts, 16,104 images

Digitization Highlights 
Every Thursday leading up to the summer months, we will feature throwbacks to digitization work done for NovaMuse on our  Facebook and Twitter! This week's post - the Southwest region. If you have helped us in the past with digitization efforts, keep an eye out! You may see a familiar face from your museum. You'll also see two of our past Fleming interns in this week's post, Heather and Kassandra! We appreciate shares on our social media platforms to reach a larger audience, why not help us spread the word?

Fleming Partnership
Students are busy reviewing their 300 adopted artifacts' database records. I chat with them via a Facebook group so that we can learn more about CollectiveAccess and the variety of objects and documentation that exists in museums, and Deb provides support during their class time. Once they finish the initial review they'll switch to research mode...can't wait to hear what they find out about our collections.

Resources

New! The NovaMuse Stories Guide is now available! A guide for creating Galleries through myNovaMuse – learn how to link together and share stories found in museum collections. This is a great opportunity for your team to brainstorm new ideas and schedule time to develop new online content. The brainstorming activity and Stories checklist in this guide will also be very helpful! Click here to download.

Updated CollectiveAccess manual

CollectiveAccess tutorials

CollectiveAccess & Collections Management Webinar Series

Photo Kit - looking to get a head start on digitization? Our photo kit is available to borrow for a 3 week period (camera not included). Interested? Email Sandi at advisory@ansm.ns.ca to check availability.