Museums Australia Conference

Paul Rowe was at the Vernon Systems stand at the Museums Australia conference. This year’s conference ran from 21st-24th of May in Sydney Town Hall. You can view Paul’s presentation on “How to cope when you open your digital doors” on Slideshare. The Slideshare page includes a Notes section at the bottom right with a rough transcript of the presentation.

Upcoming Events

Australian and New Zealand User Group meetings

Conferences: Vernon Systems will be at a number of different conferences over the coming months.

Group training days: We will be hold basic and advanced training days in our Auckland office on August 19th and 20th.

User Group Meetings: We have also announced the dates for our Australian and New Zealand Vernon User Group (VUG) meetings. Details of our UK User Group Meeting will be announced soon.

User Group Training Days: Each year our user group meetings are followed by a group training day. Each year’s training has a specific focus. Our topic for this year is “Out on the town – getting your data web ready”. We will be covering how to select data to publish, managing images and copyright, and exporting data. The day will include an overview of publishing methods available in Vernon CMS, including Vernon Browser, eHive and XML Export.

New clients

This year has been a busy one for new sites. We have so far added the following organisations to our growing community of Vernon CMS users:

Australia

• Grafton Regional Gallery
• Orange Regional Gallery
• Penrith Regional Gallery

New Zealand

• National Military Heritage Charitable Trust / Great War Exhibition

South Africa

• Franschhoek Motor Museum

We’ll have more details on the new clients in the September issue.

Current Development

Vernon CMS 9.0

We are now well into the development of version 9.0 of Vernon CMS. This will be unveiled at the annual user group meetings later in the year. One major area of new development is the addition of the Inward Rights activity file for tracking rights granted to your organisation for reproduction and use of objects. Inwards Rights can be recorded for objects in your permanent collection and inward loans. We have two clients who are helping with the initial testing of this feature later this month.

Version 9.0 includes many other changes, including a new file for tracking correspondence related to any major Cataloguing or Activities file (e.g. an outward loan or an object record), a bulk tool for creating and updating tasks, enhancements to the Vernon CMS reporting tools and unlimited user symbolics.

Vernon Browser 3.1

The latest version of Vernon Browser is now available. This version is a complete replacement of the older web templates. This has enabled us to build new mobile-friendly templates. The templates use a responsive design, automatically adjusting the layout of the pages to view the size of the screen the web visitor is using. We’re currently working on the first live client site using the new version.

Upgrading your website to use the new version requires a full redesign as we need to develop and test branding for your site on different screen sizes. This could be done when you are going through a rebranding or redesign of your main website (perhaps also to support mobile access).

Version 3.1 also includes a more detailed application programming interface (API) for sites wanting to integrate published object, person and image data into a 3rd party product. A new interactive API documentation site is available on apidocs.browser.vernonsystems.com. We will be continuing to extend the API documentation as we work with it on upcoming projects.

You can see the unbranded Vernon Browser templates with demo data on browser.vernonsystems.com. The new version also includes new demo data kindly provided by Queensland Museum. This includes some fantastic images from their natural sciences collection.

eHive

We have had a couple of major upgrades to eHive over the last quarter. The images have been migrated to Amazon’s secure storage size to improve performance and allow us to cope with larger volumes. There are currently over 2 million images stored by the system! We have also overhauled the dashboard for logged in users to make this clearer and provide more shortcuts to common areas of the system. Go to eHive.

Getting Started guides

Our documentation team have written new guides to help you get started with Vernon CMS and eHive. These cover the key considerations when first working with a system, such as setting up term lists and considering data standards. The Getting Started with Vernon CMS guide is available through our Customer Support Portal and the Getting Started with eHive guide is linked from the logged in eHive home page and as a download.

Auckland Museum launches new online collection website

Auckland Museum has launched its new online collection website. This new site makes over million records freely available, adding many new features in the process. We’re excited to have helped with publishing data from Vernon CMS, including the social and natural history object collection and the Cenotaph military personnel records.

Current Details

The Vernon Escrow flashdrive for this quarter is in secure storage. The barcode label is V051264.

Vernon CMS v8.2

Vernon Browser v3.1