Snowy temperatures greeted 14 attendees of our annual New Zealand Vernon User Group (VUG) meeting at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.
People travelled from around the motu to beautiful Ōtautahi and awoke to a teeth-chattering morning of minus four degrees. Wrapping up warm, they arrived at the gallery on Monday 19 August to grab some hot coffee and set up in the Education Centre.
Left to right: Phil Hinton (Auckland Museum), Jennifer Taylor (Sarjeant Gallery), Kyla Mackenzie (The Suter).
Vernon Systems company update
After a welcome and introductions, Paul Rowe, our CEO gave an update on Vernon Systems. Our plans include a new version of Vernon CMS later this year. This will be version 12.6, dubbed Fantastic Fantail. To improve data entry for library collections, we’ll include new fields for Call Number and Publication Series. We’re also developing a tool to bulk-delete lists of records and bulk-clear specific fields in lists of records.
One area of increasing work for us is keeping on top of security. This affects the securing of our own network and systems, and the securing of hosted Vernon CMS and Vernon Browser sites. We follow security news sites, investigate issues that could affect us, apply patches, and improve our code on an ongoing basis.
Vernon CMS is built using the OpenInsight database and desktop application platform. We’re currently using version 9.4, and this is reaching its end of life. The provider, Revelation Software, is no longer releasing updates for version 9.4. We’ve been working on version 10 this year, and it’ll be the most critical part of next year’s Vernon CMS upgrade.
The new version of OpenInsight will give us improved tools for building the user interface and performance enhancements.
New Vernon CMS clients
We’ve gained some new clients recently:
- Victoria Racing Club (Australia)
- Manly Regional Art Gallery (Australia)
- Society of Dyers and Colourists (UK)
Vernon Browser
Vernon Browser implementation projects continue to be a large part of our work. This includes helping sites decide on what to publish to a website, setting up symbolic (calculated) fields to reformat information, and customising our website templates to match the branding of a particular client.
New and upgraded Browser sites include:
- Auckland Museum
- Kentucky Online Arts Resource
- Aratoi – Wairarapa Museum of Art and History
- National Trust – Western Australia
- Sovereign Hill
- MONA (intranet)
- University of Melbourne – Anatomy & Pathology Collection (intranet)
Paul also spoke about Vernon Browser’s latest features. Check out what’s new in Vernon Browser for the full list of enhancements.
Developments at Canterbury Museum
Scott Reeves, registrar, and Kristen Ramsdale, collections inventory project manager, gave a quickfire overview of the redevelopment of Canterbury Museum. This significant rebuild project meant everything had to be moved out of the museum.
Left to right: Scott Reeves and Kristen Ramsdale (Canterbury Museum).
The team used location-based tracking to manage the mind-boggling effort:
- 2,300,000 items.
- 13,367 unique locations.
- 3,568 “tracking units”.
- 1,191 truck movements.
As part of the redevelopment, a collections inventory project was initiated. They estimated that only 40% of their collection is on Vernon CMS, leaving 1.38 million objects to come. The goals of the project included:
- Basic record for every object.
- A photograph for every object.
- An updated location for every object.
The data standards for the basic object records were:
- Cataloguer and date.
- Object numbers (accession and/or catalogue numbers and other IDs).
- Classification.
- Name/title.
- Location.
- Brief description (try to keep to 10 – 20 words).
- Object photograph.
Read more about the redevelopment on the Canterbury Museum website.
Reporting tips and tricks
Next, Phil Hinton, collections data analyst at Auckland Museum gave a series of pointers for working with search, lists, and reports in Vernon CMS. Packed with useful screenshots, this was a ‘nuts and bolts’ presentation about working with the finer details of files, records, and fields.
Phil’s tips included:
- In Advanced Search, save search results as a list in Portfolio rather than opening them. With large groups of records, it can take a while to load. You can then use the list in Reporting.
- Create a report directly from List Manager by clicking the Report button.
- Use List Manager functions such as keep selected records, shuffle, change fields, sort records, and find records.
- In Reporting, in the Display Fields window, select Show IDs to see the internal field names for each field in the file.
Help articles
Help videos
Training sessions
After lunch, it was time for learning. Paul trained the group with support from Kate McCaughan (Project Owner, Vernon CMS / Data Analyst).
Topics included:
- Group and Member records
- Person records
- Correspondence and Documents
- Data Cleanup
Help articles
Help videos
VUG Dinner
After the meeting, some of the group gathered at Tanoshi Christchurch for a delicious meal.
Left to right: Casimar Larkin (Dowse Art Museum), Kyla Mackenzie (The Suter), Phil Hinton (Auckland Museum), Kate McCaughan (Vernon Systems), Tim Jones (Christchurch Art Gallery), Yu Yu Win (Auckland Museum), Jennifer Taylor (Sarjeant Gallery), Paul Rowe (Vernon Systems). Photo: Jo Wehrly (Dowse Art Museum).
Upcoming VUG meetings
We look forward to holding our annual online VUG conference in October.
Vernon Systems develops innovative software for cultural organisations to manage and share their collections. We've been dedicated to the cultural sector since 1985.
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