As with March, we kicked of April with a meeting, this time with the Information Management & Access Committee (IMAC), which helps us with the Advisory Service. It was a very productive meeting and that means that Sandi came away with a lot of homework. But we'll be sharing some new resources in the not-too-distant future, so it's all good.
Karin met with the CNSA Education Committee, of which she is an ex-officio member. CNSA has their annual conference next week, so there was lots of last minute planning to settle. Another busy and productive group!
The Museum Evaluation Program Working Group (MEPWG) also met this month, and wow did they ever get through a lot of work. Once again we ran out of time, but made a lot of decisions about both MEP and the pending Accreditation Program, and now Karin and some group members have a bunch of homework to keep things moving along.
The most interesting event of the month was the Kairos Blanket Exercise, which Karin participated in at the Mi'kmaw Native Friendship Centre. If you ever have an opportunity to participate, do it! It is enlightening, moving, and so worthwhile.
Museum Evaluation Program
I'm not sure where the time went, but this Friday is the deadline for museums to upload their Documentation Review submissions. Several Q&A messages were circulated this month, and we did something new by offering an online training session on how to upload files for Doc Review.
Q&A messages will continue up until the Site Evaluations in July, focusing on those questions and preparations. If you have any last minute questions about the Documentation Review or encounter any issues while uploading, contact Karin asap.
CollectiveAccess Updates
There are now 298, 237 artifacts documents with 184, 499 associated images, which means that 277 new records and 2,557 new images have been added to CollectiveAccess this month. The southwest region added the most images this month and reached the 70,000 benchmark. Great work!
Here's what the numbers look like at the regional level:
Southwest - 133, 441 artifacts, 70,915 images
Central - 100,865 artifacts, 53,789 images
Northeast - 33,676 artifacts, 43,715 images
Cape Breton - 30,255 artifacts, 16,080 images
As mentioned in last month's blog post, we are working on new YouTube tutorials. We have added two new tutorials. Tutorial #1: How to use the Nomenclature website when working in CollectiveAccess. Tutorial #2: Introduction to the new Help Menu. Please watch this space, more tutorials will be released soon!
Artefacts Canada Update
Before we had NovaMuse, we contributed collections information to Artefacts Canada, which we sometimes affectionately call AC. As we were developing NovaMuse, Artefacts Canada was being reviewed, and to make a long story short, within 3-5 years there will be a totally overhauled AC. At the time, we decided not to spend time or money on developing an easy AC upload button for CollectiveAccess, but to wait until the review was complete and the new site launched. But a few months ago we got news from our friends in New Brunswick that they had worked with Whirl-i-gig to make CollectiveAccess easily talk to Artefacts Canada. So we have added this feature to our databases, tested it out, tweaked it a bit since our version is slightly different from New Brunswick's, and we are very happy to report that it's ready to roll.
What does this mean for you? If you currently have old, pre-NovaMuse records on AC, we would love to help you refresh those records. A lot of updates and changes have happened since 2011, and it would be great to see these reflected on our national collections site. Contact Sandi or Karin for more information.
Site Visits
We are excited to announce that we will be offering hub training at 6 Advisory Service sites this year. Sandi is currently communicating with potential hub sites and hope to announce more details soon. Training will be offered in each region and will be strategically placed to give members equal opportunity to attend. This year, there will be a focus on digitizing 2-dimensional items. In preparation for site visits, a survey similar to last year's will be circulated so that you can let us know what you'd like to focus on.
Museum Moments
Have you been following our new blog series? We have been having a lot of fun sharing good ideas, programs and projects from museums across the province. And we'd like to share more, so if your museum is doing something cool, let us know! Check out our latest post about Paint Maud's Cats at the Annapolis Valley Macdonald Museum. More to come, stay tuned!
Stories on NovaMuse
Summer is just around the corner! Why not start sharing galleries online? Scheduling time once per week is a great way to build your online presence. All Advisory Service sites should have their usernames and passwords but if you are missing this information, please let us know.
How do I get started?Watch our webinar on Identifying, Linking & Sharing Stories
Download our NovaMuse Stories Guide & fill out the worksheets
Find inspiration from others! Visit the NovaMuse Contributor Galleries
Resources
In 2011, we prepared a QR Code Guide for CHIN. We have updated it this month and have made it available on our website. Check it out to learn how you can use these simple yet effective barcodes to enhance your interpretative offerings.
