Many of our blogs on open source software focus on spatial tools and the hard sciences. What we haven’t delved into recently is the importance of open source software in the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). Ten years ago, Piers wrote a blog about open source collection management and it’s time for an update. Today we will focus on the growth of these solutions, our continuing support of them (and of that sector), and the open source projects we’ve been putting in place recently in GLAM organisations. 

First, to recap, open source software means that the source code is published freely – anyone can download a copy of the code, use it, and customise it. There is also the benefit of reduced ongoing costs – rather than continuing to pay annual licensing fees, open source software installations require only hosting, and upgrades to the code. In addition to financial sustainability, open source software provides technical sustainability. Because the code is freely available, it means that the community of users can contribute bug fixes and improvements in an ongoing fashion. Realising that many GLAM organisations don’t have specialised IT departments, implementation of the software and upgrades is where Gaia Resources can assist, and we have various levels of support that can be tailored to an institution’s needs. 

Open source software also supports the evidential value and provenance of your records – the source code is freely available and can be audited to ensure that your data is not being changed or manipulated by the system. Open source software provides a level of transparency for institutions that need to be able to attest that their collections are untampered with. 

When working with a collecting organisation, we usually recommend one of three open source tools; Access to Memory (AtoM), CollectiveAccess, or ArchivesSpace. The solutions we provide can be out of the box – that is, it is installed as “vanilla versions” without customisation – or in some cases, they can be heavily customised such as with our Queensland State Archives implementation of ArchivesSpace. We have particular experience in implementing the Australian Series System for archives in all of these software packages. 

Access to Memory is an open source tool that is developed and maintained by Artefactual (one of our partners in the current Digital Preservation project for Queensland State Archives). Artefactual also develops and maintains Archivematica – a tool for Digital Preservation. AtoM, as it is known colloquially, is a great tool for small to medium size archives. It provides not only an easy to use interface for staff, but offers an immediate web presence that allows public access to search the collections. For many of our customers, we have implemented add-ons or plugins to provide customised functionality, ranging from subscriber-only access to digital materials to online ordering. 

CollectiveAccess is another popular open source collection management tool. Its flexibility is a key benefit of the software, and it can be implemented to manage collections of museum objects (including all SPECTRUM functions), archival records, and digital materials. We have implemented CollectiveAccess for several clients from across the GLAM sector, from archives to high-end art collections, and even not for profits managing their own historical collections. Whirl-i-gig, out of the United States, maintains the source code for CollectiveAccess, and our own Gaia Resources developers have contributed bug fixes and added new features to the source code as we make improvements for our clients. 

ArchivesSpace is the tool that we have implemented at the greatest scale. Queensland State Archives uses a highly customised version of ArchivesSpace to manage their 64 kilometres of government records. While ArchivesSpace does come with a public interface, our work with QSA included a custom-built public interface, ArchivesSearch, and we have also implemented these systems for clients in Tasmania. Lyrasis, again in the United States, maintains ArchivesSpace core code.      

With our experience over the last fifteen years, we understand the needs of collecting organisations and can recommend solutions that fit the needs and scale of the client. We stand by our passion for open source software solutions and advocate for them as the most sustainable solution for collecting institutions. Whether your organisation is small and volunteer-run or you have kilometres of records, one of the above systems can be implemented in a way to suit your needs. 

Think we can help assess or even customise the best tool for your organisation? Get in touch with us via email or start a conversation with us on one of our social media platforms – Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Sarah

The post Open Source Solutions in the Museum and Archive Worlds appeared first on Gaia Resources.

We were asked to present on the work that we do in the archival collections around Australia, so we gave a quick run through of a range of projects that we’re working on around Australia, and talked about some common and different functionality. We then talked through some of the technology and future things that might be of interest to archives we’ve been looking at. 

The talk was given in person (with a COVID safe setup) and also on Zoom – and the Zoom call was recorded as has been made available below.

https://vimeo.com/ausarchivists/review/686909468/047a43727d

It was nice to see a few of our clients and some new faces as well.  One thing that I really like about the way the ASA operates is that it welcomes in new organisations that are seeking to learn about archiving, and some of the people we met that night asked a whole bunch of interesting questions in the session and afterwards around the technology side of archiving.

Over the years, the ASA has facilitated ways for us to learn a lot as a team about archives, and it was good to be giving something back to them and their members!  If you have questions about archives, then feel free to get in touch and ask either Meg or myself questions via our enquiries@gaiaresources.com.au email address – or start a conversation with us on our social media via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

The post Archives now and forever! appeared first on Gaia Resources.

PROV elected to use the open source software CollectiveAccess for their archival management system, and engaged us to customise it to support their new archival model, as well as integrate with other new systems they were implementing as part of this project. This included us integrating with a Persistent IDentifier (PID) minting system which assigns a persistent and unique ID to every record in PROV’s collection, and also integrating the AMS with their new warehouse management system, which manages the location of their physical records. 

This project has been an iterative process, with our team working collaboratively with PROV staff to refine and develop the functionality and integrations of the AMS as the other systems came online. We worked with vendors from around the world (leading to some unusual meeting times!) so that we could work through any issues with integrations in real time.

PROV’s new archives management system gives the public access to digital material as well as a host of integrations for staff

The last 18 months of the project were done while the world wrestled with the COVID-19 pandemic, and poor Melbourne spent a great deal of that time in lockdown – providing an unexpected opportunity for PROV to take extra time for testing before go-live. 

It was terrific to have PROV’s team so involved in this project. They had done an enormous amount of work prior to the project starting so they were very clear on how their metadata would fit into the new system, and how their business processes would work with so many new systems. 

If you would like to know more about how Gaia Resources can help you with your collection management system design and implementation, then feel free to get in touch with me directly, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Meg

The post PROV are Archive and kicking appeared first on Gaia Resources.

https://www.canada.ca/en/heritage-information-network/services/collections-management-systems/collections-management-software-vendor-profiles.html

The review was not meant to be an endorsement of particular packages, more an appraisal of what’s on offer so that museums could take a look at what works best for their needs.

Considering Gaia Resources does quite a lot of work in this space, I decided to take a look at this significant review and see what it might mean for our existing and future customers in the museums space.

First up, this review included the following vendors and packages:

• Axiell (Adlib)
• Gallery Systems (TMS and eMuseum)*
• Keepthinking (Qi)
• Lucidea (Argus)
• Lyrasis (CollectionSpace)
• MINISIS Inc. (MINISIS)
• PastPerfect (PastPerfect 5.0)
• Re:discovery (Proficio)
• SKINsoft (S-Museum)
• Vernon System (Vernon CMS and eHive)
• Whirl-i-Gig (CollectiveAccess)

* Note, only a survey was done for TMS and eMuseum, no product review was performed.

You can read all the detailed reviews and vendors response on the site, but as there is no executive summary (well, none that I could find), I thought I could add something to produce a summary of each vendor evaluation done by CHIN.

From my reading of the review, this was my take home for each of the packages:

Axiell (Adlib)

Keepthinking (Qi)

Lucidea (Argus)

Lyrasis (CollectionSpace)

MINISIS Inc. (MINISIS)

PastPerfect (PastPerfect 5.0)

Re:discovery (Proficio)

SKINsoft (S-Museum)

Vernon System (Vernon CMS)

Vernon System (eHive)

Whirl-i-Gig (CollectiveAccess)

It is clear a lot of work has gone into this review, and I highly recommend checking it out for yourself. Overall, the reviewers seemed to give S-Museum and CollectiveAccess the most positive reviews, but for smaller institutions something else might be more appropriate.

I can only recommend reading all the reviews for yourself and seeing what is the best fit your institution via the link at the start or contact us via email.

Morgan

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While the project is still very much under way, we thought it was time to introduce you to the work we’re doing, and share some insights we’ve gained in the project that may inspire some others looking at archival data management.

Why CollectiveAccess?

Whenever you choose or recommend a system, the first question people usually ask is “Why choose System Y”, or often more frequently, “Why not choose System Z?”. The answer in this scenario is that CA is highly configurable. It has a base of 11 content bundles that can be re-purposed into managing all kinds of data models and configurations. Importantly, configuring these bundles to match data requirements does not cause issues with version updates. Further, it has a web services API that means it can interact with other systems quite easily.

The data model we are supporting is novel and the system has to be interoperable with a range of other specialist systems. For these reasons, we believed CA was the best fit of the available packages that we often recommend to archives.

Preparing yields dividends

What makes this project so exciting for us is the preparation that’s gone into it from the client side. A lot of time and effort had gone into thinking about how they manage data, what the future requirements are, and what each system in their digital archive needs to perform. As a result, it’s a well-defined program of work. This project sees us working in the Archival Management System (AMS) space so we have a clear idea of what it needs to do, and how it needs to communicate with other components.

The preparation on the client side has included assessing the purpose of all individual data fields, what additional data needs to be captured into the future, and how to retain legacy data. This high level of preparation has greatly assisted the project run smoothly, and in creating a logical plan for approaching the migration and configuration of the system. In short, a huge thanks to PROV for all the planning and foresight!

Entry to the Victorian Archives Centre in North Melbourne

Rapid iteration to build a base profile, iterate on top of that

One way we’ve got the process moving quickly was to develop a draft, “rapid build” installation profile (this contains all the information about the fields, relationships, displays, report templates etc), and iterate against that on a content type by content type basis. The initial rapid build was very rough, probably a lot rougher than our team was comfortable with (sorry Mieke), but it allowed us to get moving quickly and have a base that covered the entire data model within a few weeks of starting the project.

Having a base to iterate from means that instead of trying to perfect the data model and migration scripts for a big bang release and testing round, we constantly re-run migrations and do minor changes so we are constantly building and improving. Within a week we might be able to re-run a full content import of a data subset, make half a dozen changes to the fields and layouts after that import, and re-run the import incorporating feedback at the start of the next week. All the while, the system remains up for testing and everyone can see all the changes happening as we implement them.

To support this workflow, we’ve introduced a technical process that logs incremental changes to the data model so we can build “mini-profile” updates and not need to re-install the system and re-import the data each time we make a significant change (though this is sometimes still required). I personally recommend this approach as it allows feedback to be reported and implemented in extremely tight feedback loops and ensures that assumptions or issues are uncovered very quickly.

Above I’ve shared a few brief insights into a project that’s now well underway. I do look forward to writing a few more as the project progresses and we get into the meaty components of the big item level imports and configuring the displays of relationships between all the content types.

If you would like to know more about how Gaia Resources can help you with your metadata or with system choice, design and implementation, then feel free to get in touch with me directly via morgan.strong@gaiaresources.com.au, or feel free to start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Morgan

The post Managing archives with PROV appeared first on Gaia Resources.

We recently kicked off Phase Three of the National Research Collections of Australia (NRCA) project, which started back in 2014 with our support for an evaluation project (Phase One) followed by a pilot to bring the Australian National Insect Collection into CollectiveAccess (Phase Two).  Phase Three is where we will see CSIRO adopt CollectiveAccess as a production system for all of the NRCA Collections, and this is the Big Thing for the GLAM community, with the adoption of an open source platform as part of their enterprise system.

Some of the amazing specimens in the Australian National Insect Collection, one of the collections we are moving into CollectiveAccess (image provided by CSIRO)

There is a large team behind this project, including staff from across CSIRO’s Information Management & Technology group, the NRCA group, from our team here at Gaia Resources and there is even support from the Whirl-i-gig team, who are the lead developers of CollectiveAccess.

Our role at Gaia Resources is, as it was in the last couple of projects, to integrate into the project team and provide additional capability and support in the rollout project.  This has already included:

• The “usual” stuff involved in the rollout of a new system – implementation, configuration and the like,
• Providing higher level advice and recommendations around the rollout, including reviewing technological change impacts, data standards, functionality requirements and so on,
• Leading the mapping of the data in the various source databases across to the CollectiveAccess platform, and
• Developing additional functionality within (and around) CollectiveAccess to ensure that the needs of people using the Collections can be catered for.

The project also provides the GLAM community with a great opportunity – with the team at CSIRO investing heavily in the platform and project, this means that we can also develop the community around CollectiveAccess here in Australia and beyond.  With several other CollectiveAccess projects under our belt here at Gaia Resources (such as the Royal Historical Society of WA, and the WA Museum), as well as several others underway (such as a new project supporting Public Records Office Victoria – more to come on that later), there is already a nascent Australian CollectiveAccess community and our team are some of the lead committers to the code base.  So we will be helping to develop CollectiveAccess further.

As we work with CSIRO over the rest of 2017, we will be producing some regular blogs about what we develop, learn and observe around CollectiveAccess and the GLAM community – but feel free to get in touch with us (either through social media, such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn), or via a direct email to either Morgan Strong (morgan.strong@gaiaresources.com.au) or myself (piers.higgs@gaiaresources.com.au).

Piers

The post CSIRO steps ahead with CollectiveAccess appeared first on Gaia Resources.

I heard a phrase recently which was really upsetting:

“What are the disadvantages of your software apart from it being open source?”

The implication was that the open source nature of that particular software was a disadvantage, which actually came as a shock to me.  This is something we had heard years ago but to be frank, we hadn’t heard this in a long time, and I thought this sort of thinking had been well and truly debunked.

If you want a good primer on the business case for open source you can always head to the Open Source Initiative – this page in particular! However, if you want a more specific example, back in 2012, Andrew gave a presentation at a Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute “Going Places” event that busted five myths (warts and all) about open source:

• Open source software is unsupported and unreliable
• Big companies don’t use open source software
• Open source = free
• Open source is unsustainable
• Open source improves faster

I’ve included his presentation from way back then here – it’s still relevant today.

Open-source software is software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees” (Wikipedia)

In running Gaia Resources for over 12 years, we’ve worked with a wide range of open source software, and built the business on it.  But it appears that sometimes we need to explain open source again from scratch.

Let’s look at three examples; QGIS, CollectiveAccess and Geoserver.

QGIS in particular has become one of my favourite pieces of software, spatial or otherwise.  We first implemented projects within it a number of years ago to implement a new spatial system for a client, which still is in production to this day.  Since then, we have developed a specific environmental GIS training course around it; as this freely available software fits really well with the not-for-profit Natural Resource Management (NRM) community that we work with well.  On a daily basis, Andrew, James, Jake and Tracey all use it for a variety of projects (and I do occasionally, although I get told off for “meddling”).

QGIS is not only open source, it is also freely downloadable as well.  It effectively – and comprehensively – replaces commercial GIS software packages, leading to significant cost savings for groups that use it (including us).  And as open source software, we are able to contribute to it – and back with our first project we did just that – to make QGIS work for the client, we made our first contribution to the QGIS project source code and have worked with it ever since.

We do a lot of work now in the GLAM sector, and the open source CollectiveAccess platform is one package we’ve done a lot of work with – and continue to do so.  Our work on this gave me an excuse to visit New York last year while on holiday to visit the team at Whirl-i-gig, who are the project owners of CollectiveAccess.  What’s not to like about open source software if it gives you that opportunity?

We’ve been working with the Western Australian Museum, CSIRO and the Royal WA Historical Society (as well as other organisations) in implementing CollectiveAccess.  Again, as open source software, it is freely available, and we can contribute to the source code directly, which has meant that Kehan and Ben are actually two of the most frequent contributors to the software.  We are also discussing a range of things internally about how we can help with the future directions for the software as well, and make it even better for other collections here in Australia (and beyond).

For us, CollectiveAccess comes free as a platform to start a project; and then we charge for our time in implementing it.  As an example, with the Royal WA Historical Society, while they didn’t pay any software licence fees, they paid for our time to implement the software, migrate their data from their existing platform, and then build the bells and whistles that they required – including a new web site, online shop and a new collections search portal.  And the benefit of the software being freely available means that there are no ongoing software licencing costs, so the Society only covers hosting and maintenance costs – a lot less than commercial licence costs for other collection systems.  For a small not-for-profit organisation this means they get a system that is the envy of larger organisations, at an ongoing cost that is actually affordable.

We’re also doing similar things with the AccesstoMemory (AtoM) and Archivematica open source products in the Archives space as well.

Let’s turn to one of our favourite “hidden treasures”.  Geoserver is the back end system for several of our projects, and most notably, it powers our GRID product, that delivers an online, enterprise level GIS for the NRM community (again, a not-for-profit community).

Our experience with Geoserver has been a little checkered.  Under the hood of GRID, Geoserver has historically created a few issues for us as we push it through some pretty big processes in GRID here and there.  But that said, I am really happy to say that we are about to make a whole raft of changes and upgrades to GRID to take advantage of the upgrades that have been implemented by the many people that contribute to the Geoserver code base (and this will be another blog in the near future, as well).  This will be a great improvement for the GRID product, and it didn’t cost the community that uses it anything.

We also use Mapnik, another open source mapping engine, on a number of our projects, such as Corals of the World, IGEM and others.  These projects – using either Mapnik or Geoserver – would be unlikely to be in existence without these tools being an open source product – both due to it the freely available nature of the software, and the collaborative efforts that are put into the software development.

So, QGIS, CollectiveAccess, Mapnik and Geoserver are all open source software packages that we have implemented, contributed to and collaborated on.  To me, open source means that we deliver more for less; and the funding for a project is spent delivering on the requirements that the client wants, not on providing the base level software.  I’m no Richard Stallman, and I’m not going to proselytise about open source, but for us, and our clients, it makes complete business sense.

Groups like the Open Source Initiative, Open Geospatial Consortium , OSGEO and a whole range of others actively promote open source and try to explain all the points that I’ve outlined in this post.  There’s obviously a whole range of work still required.

Meanwhile, we’ll keep on delivering high quality projects using open source products.

Piers

P.S.  You can keep in touch with us as always via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or leave a comment below.

The post The Disadvantages of Open Source appeared first on Gaia Resources.

My ASA talk – also available from Slideshare

Most of my talk was about our work with the State Records Office of Western Australia (which I’ve probably blogged enough about already).  But it also makes reference to a few other things, including the work we’ve been doing with Barbara, James and the team at Artefactual in Canada, including:

• Making all our customisations with the State Records Office WA available,
• More investigations around the Australian Series System, and
• Developing our services around this area for the Archive – and wider – community.

When we talk about the community here we are talking what has become known as the GLAM sector, covering Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (Herbaria get a bit of a bum deal here).   There’s a slight longer acronym of GLAMURR (which includes Universities, Research and Records) but that feels a bit like the acronym drives the terms!  Anyway, this sector has become really quite intriguing to me personally, since my days of doing fieldwork with staff from the Western Australian Museum, and being educated on what “collections” were.

As a result, there are two “stay tuned” components to this blog article.

The first, relating to the Australian Series System, is something that we will be working on via a collaborative approach between Gaia Resources, Recordkeeping Innovation, Hudson Molonglo and Artefactual.  While we’ve implemented the Series System at the State Records office of WA, we will be starting a new initiative at the ASA national conference that is coming up in a few weeks in Parramatta.  Barbara will be leading a ‘lightning talk’ on the Wednesday where we will be discussing how we are looking to operationalise the Australian Series System across the open source platforms we support, including AtoM and ArchivesSpace.  We really want to get involvement from the end users as well, so we’re doing this in an open and collaborative fashion.*

The second “stay tuned” component is to look at the offerings we are making to the GLAM community.  In terms of collection management, we already work with the AtoM and CollectiveAccess open source platforms, and this is supplemented with Hudson Molonglo’s support of ArchivesSpace as well.  So as a collective, we can provide support for several of the GLAM sectors straight away.  We can also provide support for digital preservation though our work (and ongoing relationship with Artefactual) via Archivematica.  In particular, digital preservation has a lot to offer the broader GLAM sector (and that is a blog in itself for the future).

As a collective, we are developing a few different solutions here for the GLAM community, including:

• Creating roadmaps to collection management or digital preservation – how do you get there from where you are at now,
• Implementing collection management systems – like AtoM, ArchivesSpace or CollectiveAccess, and then customising them to suit your needs,
• Implementing digital preservation systems – using Archivematica as our main platform of choice, in conjunction with other services like cloud based storage,
• Migrating data from your existing systems to the new ones,
• Hosting your systems for you, including providing these services through cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, and
• Supporting you and your organisation before, during and after this type of transition.

We already have a few new projects starting up in the coming months around these services, and we are looking at how best to resource and implement this.  It’s going to be another interesting time here at Gaia Resources – so hence the “stay tuned”!  And of course, you can do that through this blog, or through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

* As a footnote, the new Records In Context (RIC) standard will likely also have a role to play here – and that’s something we’re also investigating.

The post When Collections become GLAM appeared first on Gaia Resources.

So, a recap – we have helped the Royal Western Australian Historical Society realise their vision of providing present and future generations with access to the history of Western Australia.  By implementing CollectiveAccess, the Society has significantly upgraded their existing digital Museum, Photograph, Library collections, and their Public Memorials dataset, into a new web-enabled collections management system.  At the same time, we have built for the Society a new website with a fresh look and feel featuring a public research front-end to all the collections, as well as a brand-new online bookshop and archival products catalogue with an e-commerce facility.

We’ve been steadily taking on more work in the Collections area, and this is one of which we’re particularly proud.  Most of the team – except Morgan, who’s based in Brisbane – were at the launch event last night – so here’s our team photo:

The team at the launch event – Back row: Ben, Kehan and Piers, Front Row: Graham, Lorraine, Helen and Alex
(Photo: Wendy Lugg)

All of the team at the RWAHS are volunteers, and their passion for the project has been infectious – especially Helen, Graham and Lorraine pictured above who have championed this project from the Society’s side.  All of the volunteers have been highly responsive to the Agile process we have run throughout the project, and have been very engaged and interested in this profound change to the way that they manage their collections.  As an example, this whole web-based system is hosted in Amazon Web Services infrastructure, and this provides a very robust and effective base to the whole project – quite a different proposition from running desktop software.

There are three main areas of the project, and so we thought we’d provide a brief rundown on each.

Website

The website has been developed using Drupal 8, and it’s been deliberately chosen for this for a few reasons, not the least of which is the familiarity that our team (across Kehan, Ben and Morgan) have with this platform.  Morgan has championed the design of the site (even remotely from Brisbane) and we have used a range of interactive methods during this process, including demonstration videos that Morgan has provided from Brisbane for the client back in Perth.

The new design of the web site is clean and modern; yet shows off the history well!

Collections

The collections area can be broken down into two main components – the back end CollectiveAccess system which powers the ‘research front end‘.

During the project, we migrated all of the RWAHS’ collections – across the Library, Photographic Collection, Museum Collection and Public Memorial collection – into CollectiveAccess from their historical Collections Mosaic system.  This wasn’t a small task in itself, but thankfully the record keeping and collections management efforts of the volunteers from the Society has been very robust, and their experience in collections management is very evident – many of the volunteers retired from roles with the Western Australian Museum and other collections institutions!  Kehan championed this management of the migration and the CollectiveAccess rollout components, and has been working with a range of tools that are very useful in this process, such as Google Refine.

The end result – we migrated 39,868 objects,  23,095 images and
c.20,000 ancillary data items across two collections into CollectiveAccess.

Of course, we also had to build the research front end, and Ben took the lead here to build a new query system that sits on top of the CollectiveAccess platform, and provides a simple, neat search mechanism for the collections, as shown below.

The research front end for the site is a powerful search mechanism that allows for quick retrieval of results.

We had initially thought that we would use the CollectiveAccess Pawtucket module for this approach, but with the requirements of the project, we decided to build this as a bespoke system.  The end result is clean and fast and we hope to be able to bring this new approach out as an open source toolset that can be used with CollectiveAccess in the near future.

Shop

The online shop has been the most problematic component for us, mainly due to the choice to use Magento.  While it’s a powerful system, it’s not without its black magic to get things done, and that’s been a source of irritation for the crew – we certainly have a higher respect for people that do work in this platform.  In any case, Ben and Morgan have been working on the shop component, and it is ready for release – we’re just waiting on the RWAHS volunteers to make a few final decisions on the pricing models!

A sneak peek at the shop

The project has resulted in a very good outcome for the Society, as the President Sally Anne Hasluck, outlined in the launch event yesterday.  We’ve really been in awe of the RWAHS team that have worked with us on this – we have had a very positive  collaborative relationship that has meant we’ve all learned.  The RWAHS will be able to further develop and document their collections, coordinate collections research and access to the public based on this infrastructure – and we’ll be there if they need any assistance.

I know how much effort the team here have put into the project; there’s been a few late nights, and a fair share of hair-pulling out, desk thumping moments, but Ben, Kehan, Morgan and Alex have done a great job and this is definitely a project we can be proud of.

You can start learning more about Western Australian History via their website, or you can dive directly into the collection via the Collections site.

Piers

P.S. Feel free to leave a comment below, drop us an email, or start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post Western Australian History Goes Online appeared first on Gaia Resources.

 The new compactuses (compactii?) in the wet store

Our work with the Museum is centred on their Collection Management Information System, and after some recent pauses in the project while the infrastructure is sorted out, we will kick on with the rollout in the coming weeks, with a finalisation in early September.  This project, which uses the open source CollectiveAccess software, has been a long project with our team.

The rollout of CollectiveAccess collections management system has been in abeyance for the last 6 months while the system was moved to more reliable hardware in the new Malaga Data Centre.  The opportunity was taken to also move the environment onto the latest versions of CollectiveAccess and ElasticSearch, and to thoroughly test the resulting performance in preparation for training the natural history curators and ‘going live’ sequentially over the coming couple of months.

Anyway, back to the wet store – it felt pretty wonderful to see what was in that building, from the large wet store racks (with space to grow) and the new labs built in the upper floors.  I know from all of our perspectives – my own history with the Museum from as far back as my days as an environmental consultant, from Morgan’s perspective as someone who was involved in many aspects of the Museum while working there, and from Alex’s own history with the Western Australian Herbarium’s new facility – this is an amazing milestone for the organisation that will be well used for a long time.

Part of the detail on the outside of the new facility

Even though the Museum’s Perth site will be closed for a few years while construction of the new facility in Perth is underway, there will be a lot of work going on in this new building. I am looking forward to seeing what pops up around the city from the Museum team in the meantime!

Piers

P.S. The usual – leave comments below, or start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

The post Behind the scenes at the Western Australian Museum appeared first on Gaia Resources.

“present and future generations will have access to the history of Western Australia”.

The Society’s Technology Committee understood that honouring this vision necessitated a strong digital presence on the Web, to stimulate greater interest in Western Australian history and attract new members by enhancing the accessibility and knowledge of the Society’s collections and its services. The RWAHS successfully won a $140,000 Lotterywest grant to progress this goal, and back in March we attended the launch of the project.

Gaia Resources Kehan Harman and Alex Chapman together with convenor of the Technology Committee Helen Henderson and RWAHS president Sally Anne Hasluck at the project launch. Photo: Wendy Lugg

Gaia Resources is helping the Society realise their vision by significantly upgrading the Society’s existing digital Museum, Photograph, Library collections (as well as the Public Memorials dataset) into a new web-enabled collections management system, using Collective Access.  This is the same database software we have been using to implement an integrated CMIS at the WA Museum and in a pilot projects with the CSIRO.

At the same time, we are reconfiguring the RWAHS website to provide access to this data for over 70 affiliated agencies in metropolitan and regional WA as well as to national and international institutions and their researchers. Along with easier site maintenance will come a fresh look and feel to the website and a brand-new online bookshop and archival products catalogue with an e-commerce facility.

Our team (Kehan, Ben, Piers and myself) have been really enjoying working with the team at RWAHS, and it has been gathering some great media attention in the local papers as well!

The recent Post article outlining the project

We’re well on track with the project and will be posting more on delivery at the end of the financial year.

Alex

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Prior to this, we assisted CSIRO in their evaluation of the available collections management software, including both commercial products and open source ones.  After this evaluation, and with the experience of the Western Australian Museum (who undertook a large requirements evaluation and investigation project of their own before commissioning Gaia Resources to implement CollectiveAccess) CSIRO chose to pilot CollectiveAccess with the ANIC.

The ANIC is full of amazing specimens – working on their database records doesn’t always do them justice (Photo courtesy Beth Mantle)

Speaking of the Western Australian Museum, our project on implementing their new collection system in CollectiveAccess is again underway after a brief hiatus with our CSIRO work.  Our team have been on site at the Western Australian Museum preparing for the rollout, which will happen around the decant to their new wet store at Welshpool.  We’ll blog more about this in the new year.

Working with CSIRO has been a really positive experience.  The team involved has included representatives from CSIRO’s Information Management and Technology (IM&T) group, a number of ANIC staff, and representatives from the National Research Collections of Australia (NRCA).  This has brought a number of skillsets together, and I think we can say that all involved would readily agree that this has been of great benefit to the project.

From the technical side of things, we were working on this project using Agile methodology, and it has been very productive.  We’ve steadily been adopting Agile methodologies more and more in our projects, and it worked well during this one.  This method kept the project on track, but also allowed for several evolutions during the project.  Working remotely with a team always has challenges, but again technology has come to the fore here.  Daily standups and longer planning meetings were held via video and teleconferencing facilities, and these worked well, no matter where we were.

You can read more about the project in the latest issue of ANICdotes, the ANIC newsletter.

Our team also had the opportunity to lead the development of additional functionality within CollectiveAccess, such as the integration with the National Species lists that we recently blogged about.  This will be of great use to anyone in Australia that has implemented CollectiveAccess for biological collections and wants to use a national taxonomic checklist.  There were also a few other contributions we’ve made to CollectiveAccess over the course of the project, and Kehan and Ben are still up in the top 10 committers to CollectiveAccess.

It’s thanks to the hard work of the team behind CollectiveAccess at Whirl-i-gig software in New York (where I dropped in earlier this year to meet them) that these contributions have been well-received and readily integrated into the software.  We will continue to support the CollectiveAccess community in this way and hope to have some additional contributions to make in the coming months.

In fact, we are just starting another new CollectiveAccess implementation (we’ll have more details in the new year).  With the Western Australian Museum and CSIRO implementations we’ve already been involved with, this is really starting to build the CollectiveAccess community here in Australia.  With a number of additional new implementations on the cards here in Australia, 2016 is going to be a very interesting year, and I think we’re going to be looking for talented software engineers and collections specialists to come and join the team… so get your CVs ready!

Meanwhile, CSIRO are in their evaluation period for CollectiveAccess, with the team at ANIC putting the system through their paces.  We are keeping a watching brief during the evaluation period and dropping in from time to time on the team (at least virtually) and we’re looking forward to seeing the results – which are looking very positive already!

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Piers

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