June 2022 Update

 Phew! What a month! We had more meetings than we could count and juggled a lot of different projects in our small team. Some days it felt like we were moving mountains and winning all the battles, and other days it felt overwhelming and almost impossible to manage. I know that we are not alone in these feelings. They are unfortunately very common in the museum field. During the difficult days it is important to use some healthy coping mechanisms to get you through. At ANSM we have two go-to's - humour and food. We crack jokes and laugh over cake. This month we had several cake days. And one week that felt especially hectic, we celebrated our accomplishments visually and then rewarded ourselves with ice cream treats. So consider this a little reminder to embrace your own healthy coping mechanisms, whatever they may be. 

TRACK Updates

There are now 90 museums registered for TRACK, including almost every CMAP-receiving museum and Nova Scotia Museum site. We are so excited to see this momentum. We are also very appreciative of all the great input that people shared during the registration process. Knowing where museums are thriving and where they would like help means we will better be able to serve our members. We are compiling all of this input so that we can plan and prioritize TRACK activities.

The new assessment document is back from our readers and they gave us lots of great input. We are slowly but surely working through it all and having follow-up chats with readers. We are a bit behind schedule on this but our next working group meeting is scheduled and we're hoping to have the document finalized and released to pilot sites by August. 

We are also in the process of organizing some more webinars, knowledge-sharing activities and consultations as we get TRACK off the ground this year. We will be sharing more details soon, so stay tuned!

If you haven't yet registered or want to learn more about this program, you can check out our website for info, and click here to register.

Unlocking Museum Collections

We have named this year's MAP-funded project to develop a digitization strategy, "Unlocking Museum Collections", and this month we really 'unlocked' this project. We held our orientation session for museums and opened registration for the community sessions on Tuesday. 19 people have already registered! 

As we said during orientation, everyone we talk to about this project is excited about it. The past decade of collections work has been so impressive, and helped us to build so many partnerships and make so many improvements. This next step of hosting discussions with community members feels like a great and important next step. So this is what we will be doing as hub training this summer. Each session will include a presentation on Mi'kmaq, African Nova Scotian, Acadian or Gaelic culture and history, and give museums and community members an opportunity to talk about museum collections and how we can better meet community needs.  

 It is incredibly important for museums in the Advisory Service to be present at one session, but you can sign up for more than one if you wish. Whether it's the curator, manager, board member or key volunteer, you don't want to miss out. 

If you missed the orientation session you can watch it here. To register for one of the community sessions, click here.

CollectiveAccess Updates

Madeline has started reviewing Culture field entries in all of the databases as part of our Unlocking Collections project. She's correcting typos and grammatical errors, and also keeping track of trends she notices so she can share those in a future blog post. We are excited to add a new browse option to NovaMuse, but we recognize how important it is to get this right. You can do your part by monitoring the work of summer staff and making sure fields are used appropriately. 

We always see a jump in database work when summer staff arrive and this year is no exception. Throughout June, 11,268 new records were entered into the databases, along with 3,083 associated media files, for a new total of 352,621 records and 322,119 associated images. That is a lot of new content. Congrats to everyone who is working through their documentation backlog, catching up on cataloguing, and getting the collection digitized. This is great to see. How's how those numbers break down on a regional level:

Southwest: 149,453 records and 106,565 images
Central: 108,845 records and 108,000 images
Northeast: 61,268 records and 81,703 images
Cape Breton: 33,055 records and 25,851 images

Our image lesson of the month is a reminder about how cameras and computers talk to each other. When the camera is turned to take a photo, the file sometimes appears sideways when it is transferred to the computer. The computer is trying to orient the photo as if the camera were held upright. That's what happened here. The photo was attached to the database but someone didn't go back and look at the file after it finished processing. The result is a sideways image. In addition to that issue, this is a great image to remind everyone about how to photograph framed works of art. The frame should be on an easel or hanging on the wall and photographed straight on. Remember the book cover rule - think about how book covers are shown online and you'll notice that they are always scanned and only the cover is visible. No dead space around the edge, no scale in the lower left corner. Artworks should be photographed (or scanned) the same way.

Educational Partnerships

Emma and Madeline continue to tackle a variety of tasks, helping with databases, resource development, TRACK and accreditation. They are also diversifying their experience by spending some time at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in both visitor services and collections work. 

The SMU course seminars have wrapped up and next week the students begin their practicum work. This will align with our Unlocking Museum Collections project; they will be working in teams on researching cultural materials and place names and collections associated with their designated cultural group. They will also be doing a job shadow at a museum in order to learn more about how museums operate on a daily basis. Thank you so much to the museums who have opened their doors to these students. They are very excited to spend a day working on-site and to learn more about the people and cultures that have shaped Nova Scotia.

That's all for this month. We hope to see many of you at community sessions in July. Until then, don't forget to find your own cake or ice cream to get through any difficult days.