NovaMuse Galleries - Mirroring Temporary Exhibits

Hello everyone,

Today's post includes a NovaMuse Contributor Gallery tip!

Looking for an easy way to generate engaging content in your contributor gallery? It can be difficult carving out time to devote to the development of online content. We understand that schedules fill up quickly and to-do lists continue to grow.

So, a simple place to start is to mirror what you have on display in your temporary exhibits in your contributor galleries. This way, you are not only adding to your museum's online presence, you are also linking your museum activity to your online activity. This helps you bridge the gap, ensures consistency and helps strengthen your museum's marketing and reach. It also gives you a platform to share your temporary exhibits with others long after they are replaced onsite. It is the perfect opportunity for you to document what your museum has on display and compare one display to the next. This allows you to identify trends and stories told throughout the years.

What if your temporary exhibit featured a neat bicycle that would take up too much space to incorporate as part of your permanent exhibit? If a gallery were made on NovaMuse, the bicycle's story would not be lost once put back in storage.

Both images:
Vector Design by www.vecteezy.com

What if you have a textile collection on temporary exhibit? You may have the mannequins on loan from another museum and do not have a proper way to display the dresses after it ends. Why not share their story in a gallery? 

Even better, what if you had a temporary exhibit that featured a photograph of husband and wife, as well as, the husband's bicycle and latter he used in his business (as seen in figure 1), and his wife's dress (as seen in figure 2)? This would make a fascinating story that should live on through the NovaMuse galleries. The possibilities are endless. Be strategic, use your time 

wisely, and create a plan to share your temporary exhibits with a larger audience and for a greater length of time!

Do you have a few items on loan for your temporary exhibit from another museum and these items are on NovaMuse? Feel free to add these records as well to your contributor gallery. That's right! You can also add records from other museums on NovaMuse if it strengthens your gallery's story. 

Looking for more inspiration? Check out the NovaMuse Stories Guide! Available to download on the ANSM website - please click here. Please contact Sandi (advisory[at]ansm.ns.ca) once your new gallery is complete if you would like us to share the news on the NovaMuse Twitter & Facebook page.

#150Touchstones to Celebrate #Canada150

Hello everyone!

We have very exciting news to share! As you’ve been hearing ANSM has some big plans to celebrate Canada’s 150^th birthday. These include crowd-sourcing a virtual exhibit, working with high schools to make the final selection and conduct the curation, and then working with performance artists to tell Nova Scotia’s story through theatrical interpretation of the selected artifacts and stories they contain – 150 touchstones.

Working with the 50+ museums that contribute to NovaMuse.ca, we will be seeking to identify the top #150Touchstones that celebrate Nova Scotia and its role in Canadian national development and identity. The first step in the process is to get people to vote for their favourite artifacts – for the 'touchstones' to include in the project that they feel really represent their community, its stories, and Nova Scotia as a whole. 

NovaMuse now hosts 213,000+ artifacts from over 50 museums. Even though only 112,000 of those records have images, we know that is still a LOT of stuff to sort through to find your favourites. To help show the diversity of the collections ANSM and contributing museums will be showcasing some favourites on social media using the tag #150Touchstones. But we hope that people will also check out the collections of their favourite museums to find and vote for the artifacts they think should be included. 

Timeline view of some confederation-era artifacts

We have some really cool artifacts that relate directly to confederation, like the simple but impressive anti-confederation banner at the Desbrisay Museum. We also have a lot of artifacts that date to this era, like military forage caps at The Army Museum. But Nova Scotia's role in Canada isn't limited to the 1860s. We have amazing artwork, inventions, and cultural touchstones that represent the diversity of the province and the adaptability of its people. From Mi'kmaq quillwork to African Nova Scotian basketry to Acadian dyking shovels to Planter and Loyalist furniture brought from elsewhere to modern folk art, we have a lot of stories to share.

Voting Button View

So let's get down to business. To vote for an artifact, just go to its page and click on the Vote #Canada150 button underneath the image. You'll be asked to answer a simple math question to confirm you are a human, because we don't want any spambots to mess up the results. We want to hear from people, not computer programs, so this little security measure had to be added.

If you want to support a particular museum you can use the contributor map tab to click on that museum and see its collection, or you can use the browse tab to refine general searches until you see the types of artifacts you're interested in. There are no limitations on voting, so enjoy exploring the collections and voting for as many artifacts as you would like, as often as you would like. And keep an eye on social media to see which artifacts are being shared by museums. If you want to see how other people have voted and look at the top contending artifacts, you can visit the "most voted" page.

Most voted page view

This is an opportunity for us to hear from Nova Scotians (and our broader audience) what they appreciate about our museums and their collections. This has been one of the goals of NovaMuse since its inception and I for one am excited to see which artifacts rise to the top. Getting this kind of information will enable us and the museums to better serve Nova Scotians through our exhibits and programs. We're constantly adding new artifacts and information to NovaMuse, and would love to align those efforts with the public interest.

So let's start spreading the word and getting out the vote!

Made in Nova Scotia

I realized I've been mentioning our "manufacturers database" a fair bit lately, but have never really gone into detail about the work. So I thought it might be time to do that.

When this research project started in the early 1990s I was far too busy playing with Barbies to wonder what was going on in museums. Unbeknownst to me and Skipper, people across Nova Scotia were working very hard to gain a better picture of our industrial heritage. Fast forward to 2006 and we started gathering these research materials about people and companies that were creating material goods in Nova Scotia. "Industry binders" for 6 counties were uncovered: Annapolis, Cape Breton, Cumberland, Hants, Kings and Yarmouth. Another one for the city of Dartmouth was found and added to the mix. The largest body of information came from the Nova Scotia Museum of Industry, the instigator of the 1990s research project, and included information on businesses across the province. The earliest entries date back to the 17th century. I can't speak to the decisions around including some businesses and not others. Given the scope of the work, I can only imagine the headaches and tedium of reviewing trade directories, phone books, maps, artifacts...it seems a never-ending task. It is extremely difficult to gather all the necessary resources for a comprehensive body of knowledge, and this difficulty would have been multiplied in the 1990s, before such online resources as the important Canadian Directories: Who Was Where.

So, once we got our hands on all those paper files we started the data entry. It was a long process since most of the records were photocopies of handwritten files. There is a reason your mother always said to write clearly (or was that just my mom?). Anyway, we deciphered and entered these thousands of records into a very basic MS Access database that my predecessor built for the job. When we switched over to CollectiveAccess, our new friend Seth migrated this as well. And there it sat for awhile. I'd get random requests for info since our members have known about the resource, but they still couldn't access it themselves. Then we launched NovaMuse.ca and realized that it was the perfect host for the industrial information. Not only could people learn about these businesses, but we could link them to museum collections across the province. Perfect! I'll skip the details of how we made this happen, but it took about a year to finesse everything.

Just prior to its launch, we realized that we had to address the name issue. Sometimes we'd been calling this the industries database, other times the manufacturers database, but we always had to tag on a disclaimer that this name was a misnomer due to the variety of businesses and companies included, local artisans to large factories etc etc. We needed a quick term to use for the browse button that said this without sounding neurotic. So we settled on "Made in Nova Scotia". This shouldn't have been such a debate, especially since we spent a number of years researching locally made items.
This new browse basically adds another layer to NovaMuse. When you click on it, you get some more options to help you find who or what you're looking for. Interested in your town? Operations from a certain time period? Or maybe you want to check and see if great great grandpa Bob's cooperage is listed. If one of the museums has something related to Bob's cooperage, you can easily navigate from the business profile to the object.

As we've worked through the reconciliation of collections databases with the 7300+ business profiles, we have found that there are a lot of holes. On the one hand we've been finding a lot of physical evidence of people and companies that aren't included in the resource - newspaper advertisements, objects that are stamped with the name of their manufacturer, photographs of factories, etc. As you can imagine, it is very frustrating to not be able to link these items. On the other hand, there are currently 7000 businesses that have no physical evidence in museum collections. Granted we still have a lot of artifact & archival records to review, but it's pretty clear that we won't ever match up 100% of the businesses.

This speaks to the larger issue of collections development. As we continue to develop NovaMuse, we are gaining a better and better picture of Nova Scotia's material culture. We can see what we have preserved well, and what we are missing in museum collections. We all have limited space and limited resources. We have to be more cautious than ever in our collecting habits, and what better way to do that than by thinking local?

So check it out. Share it with your friends. If you see someone you know, if we've missed a detail about a company or if you have information you'd like to add, let us know! And check back regularly because this is an active work in progress.

Introducing NovaMuse

We've been talking about it for a long time as the "collections website", and with the release of our conference program the cat is officially out of the bag. In three weeks time we will be launching NovaMuse.ca. 51 community museums from across Nova Scotia will be sharing their collections online for all the world to see.

What's behind the name? 
Well, Nova because we're in Nova Scotia, and also because it means new - and this is certainly new territory for us!  Muse acknowledges that this is a heritage website; the contributors are museums (in the broad sense of the word - including archives, galleries and interpretive centres). It also acknowledges the inspiration of the muses and that we hope people will find the site inspiring. It contains tens of thousands of artworks, handmade crafts and tools, clothing fashions from years gone by...plenty of stuff to inspire the creative mind.

How did we get here?

CMA Award

Since 2006 community museums in Nova Scotia have been contributing collections information to Artefacts Canada and the Virtual Museum of Canada. But long before that there was talk of a heritage portal for Nova Scotia. In 2002 a group of 18 community museums got together and said it was time to standardize their practices, beginning with a collections database system. So they started with a basic Microsoft Access system that was custom-built. Over the years this group of 18 grew to 50+ heritage organizations from one tip of the province to the other (literally). This crazy experiment was called the Passage Project, and in 2006 received a Canadian Museums Association Award for Outstanding Achievement in Museum Management. Now known as the ANSM Advisory Service, participating museums have recognized the value of cooperative work and responded to the many challenges we have put to them. Whether it was creating a Wikipedia page for the museum or scanning old photographs or selecting showcase items to be researched in-depth, these museums continued to step up to the plate.
So in 2010 when we realized it was time to move to a different database system, and that CollectiveAccess was the logical choice, the museums were again ready to brave the unknown. The opportunities of this new system made the decision to launch a Nova Scotia collections website a no-brainer.

How will it work?
The website is fairly simple right now. You can find specific objects, browse through different themes, look at a certain museum's collection, or for the museum nerds check out categories from Nomenclature 3.0. You can then refine your search results by using a number of filters.
We also want this to be a dialogue with the public. We don't know everything about every single item in our collections. And we definitely don't have personal stories to share with each and every object. But we know there are a lot of knowledgeable people out there who have stories and information to share. So you will be able to login and leave comments on individual artifact records. Do you recognize a photograph? Tell us who the people are! Tell us where it was taken! Did you work at that factory and can explain how something was made? We would love to hear from you! Are you conducting research or just want to save some of your favourite records for future reference? Well you can do that through the lightbox feature. Once you've created an account, you can login and go back to those favourites time and again. You don't have to have an account to use the website; only if you want to save your favorite items or submit comments and tags. The associated museum will be alerted to these comments and answer questions or add your information to their collection records.
Behind the scenes, each museum's copy of CollectiveAccess feeds the website. At the end of every day a refresh will run, updating the website with any additions/corrections/changes made during the day. We have installed a quality control filter (read about it here) that will help maintain the professionalism of the website and also give the museums some suggestions on how to fix their data. We also have placeholder images for any items without an associated image. This is a work in progress. Over 187,000 records are in the databases right now...that's a lot of photographing and scanning to do. Each museum chooses which records get shown online, item by item. Some are opening up their entire collection, while others are being selective. So it will be very interesting to see how many of the 187,000+ objects are ready by the launch date (we're still running the data and museums are actively updating information).

When exactly is it launching?
NovaMuse will be online and available to the public as of September 13th. The official launch will take place at Acadia University during our annual conference, and will include a wine & cheese reception. We hope to see all of the contributing museums represented and have invited special guests as well. Keep in mind the early bird registration deadline (ie. the cheap rate) is August 31st.


This has been and continues to be an incredible journey through the world of museums. We know that the launch of a basic collections website is just the beginning. It opens an entire world of possibilities, and I for one am very excited to see where this journey takes us.

Quality Control

We are currently re-importing the records into NovaMuse. I'm not just sitting around watching this take place, but I do check in from time to time, trying out searches and checking the quality and consistency of data.

As we've been wrestling with the many tasks associated with the NovaMuse launch, we've had a lot of conversations about quality control. We want this site to be highly respected by the public and by our professional peers. We want it to make our museums look good! A lot of hard work goes into running a museum, and the website should be something that makes people sit up and take notice of this great work. So if someone hasn't been following professional standards, it will be very noticeable when mixed in with records that are nice and clean. This will make the museum look bad, and take away from the credibility of the website.

So we've built in a quality control filter. When you set a record to be accessible to the public, it has to go through our filter before it will display on NovaMuse. Anything that gets blocked will be added to a new "to do list" widget so you can see what needs fixing. Here are some lessons on how our quality control filter will work:

1. Object Names - these should follow the Nomenclature book. The basic formula is Generic Name, Qualifier. For example: Chair, Rocking. That's it. Nothing else. No numbers or symbols or descriptive details go in this field. But of course with over 187,000 records and many different people entering data, we have some inconsistency here. Below is a screen shot from NovaMuse. Highlighted in red are things that I should not see as options in the object name browse feature. No numbers, no symbols. In the list itself - no sentences. So these records will all be blocked until they are fixed by the contributing museum. I have highlighted in blue some of the object names that I see within these records. Book. Booklet. Hat, Top. Grinder, Meat. Notecard.  

Messy Object Names - these will all be blocked

2. Ownership - if you have tagged loaned or deaccessioned items as "accessible to the public", these will be blocked from view. If you don't own it, you don't have the right to show it off online. And we won't be expending public resources on private collections (and neither should you!). Loaned items should not be given accession numbers or entered in the database, but I know that a lot of people have numbered & entered their loans. So your "to do list" will alert you to any loans that you tried to showcase online.

No loans allowed!

it's a medicine bottle...I think

3. Image Resolution - Images uploaded to NovaMuse cannot be downloaded or saved from the site. If people want a copy, they can request one from the museum. So we want the best possible resolution, allowing people to zoom in and see the details of the item. Low resolution images won't just hide details, but will display as blurry blobs online. So anything below 800 pixels will be blocked and added to your "to do list". Blurry images make us all look bad.

4. The five field rule - if you have fewer than 5 fields containing data in a record, the record will remain invisible until you add more information. Listing a basic inventory of object name & accession number is going to be more frustrating than useful to the public. So as you continue to add & update information, skeletal records will gradually be unblocked and added to the website. 

As I've travelled the province I have had a very positive response to this filter. People seem to like the idea of getting a list of things to fix. And since the website will run a daily refresh, the list of blocked items can be gradually worked through and the clean records will seamlessly appear online.