8th Australasian Emu User Group Meeting

This years EMu User group meeting was hosted by Sydney's Australian Museum. Some of the Papers are well worth a read and have just been published on the KE website here http://www.kesoftware.com/content/view/1153/437/lang,en/

Some fantastic things are happening online, with EMu as the driving force behind some revamped Collections Web pages at Museum Vic and Te Papa.

Matthew Churchward & Ely Wallis discussed the development phase of Museum Victoria's soon-to-be-released History and Tech Collections website. Analysis of their web stats revealed that most people land on their web pages via a search engine that took them directly to an object's catalogue record page. So they took the approach of designing the object page as the starting point and allowing visitors to navigate from there. The result is a detailed (and very nice looking!) catalogue record page rather than a top-down approach to web design - some sneak previews are included in the presentation.

Another great paper worth a read is Adrian Kingston's demo of Te Papa's new website which is driven from EMu Narratives, Catalogue, Parties and Thesaurus Modules. The Thesaurus Module enables web users to simply click on the familiar hotlinks to browse to other objects, or gain more information about a person or topic by clicking on the word.

Have a look around here http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/ and notice the basic level of catalogue entry they provide is even less than our skeleton records. In 2005 when Te Papa released their first catalgoue records online, they published a highly edited and detailed set of 3000 records (just as we did!), but soon realised that a wider sample of records with less detail was a more useful approach to providing greater levels of public access and getting their content out into the world. All food for thought before the Arts Centre's Website is redeveloped....

Rowena