1. DO Fire your Social Media Manager

That’s right, if you have one (you almost certainly don’t need one), the first thing you should do is let him/her/them go.  Social media adds nothing to a museum or its image and over the years I have seen lots of talk in support of social media but ZERO results. It promises the engagement of a rather unproductive crowd which doesn’t really deliver anything. No one has been able to prove that spending £50,000 a year on a qualified social media marketing professional has generated even  half of that in visitor or store revenue – time to accept that social media is just about bloating our egos, not about running  a museum or a business. I’m waiting for someone to furnish evidence to change my opinion on this – so if you have some concrete numbers, please do share them.

2. DO Adopt the Cloud

Yes, you do not need to pay for client machines, servers, Microsoft office or a collections management system upfront. The world has come a long way, you need to evolve too. Try Google Apps (http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/) or Microsoft Office 365 (http://office365.com) – you’ll be blown away by how much you can save. For Collections Management, try something like Vesica – https://vesica.ws/forms/sign-up/ (and here’s my only sales pitch to you). See how much you would save by switching – https://vesica.ws/savings-calculator/. You’ll probably only spend a 10th of what you pay for traditional software and hardware – seriously – if banks can switch to the cloud, museums have no excuse.

3. DO Accept Free Help

I’ve seen this happen so many times – museums don’t have money or resources, they’re shutting down, but they’ll only accept cash in the form of help? What’s going on here? Beggars can’t be choosers – and money is generally earned (even donations are) – so whether you get free software, scanning equipment, space or volunteers – the goal should be to save the museum’s assets, not to run it the way you think is right, which brings me to my next point.

4. DO Care about the Museum, not Just your Career

Yes, please. When others see that you genuinely care about the museum and precious items it houses, people will give you money and help. All too often I’ve seen that nobody cares about making improvements – so if you could save £100k a year by doing 1 and 2 above – you should do it. Just because the Social Media manager is your friend does not mean you should bankrupt the museum and just because helping the museum save £50k a year by adopting the cloud will mean some planning and thinking more than you’d like to, doesn’t mean you should waste the £50k. Remember that if your vendors see you are dedicated, they will do all they can to help too.  And don’t say that you boosted Facebook fans by 5,000 by building a great Social Media Strategy – it means nothing to a struggling museum.

5. DON’T build an iPhone App

Or an Android or Windows App. Seriously – unless you can accomplish something with the app like increasing visitor footfall, increasing store sales and or just make the world a better place, don’t do it to build your CV with project management skills. Visitors who are interested in visiting the museum don’t want to do it with an iPhone App -an iPhone App can add nothing ground-breaking to a museum experience or do something to help it survive – save your cash and put it where it matters – in conservation or education or whatever your museum’s goal is. Same question as social media – when was the last time a museum built a mobile app that actually could be quantified into something positive for the museum? Never (not yet, anyway) – the iPhone demographic is just wrong for most museums.

6. DO Engage your Audience

Now that you’ve saved a ton of money – send some invitations to your local community and give them a guided tour of your museum. Inspire the community to share, conserve and participate. The power of heritage can be captivating when seen and felt in person, and real human contact does and will ALWAYS offer your visitor the real experience a museum should. This kind of engagement will create real value for your museum that social media or digitization never can. I can only tell you, for instance, that you can see as many detailed photos of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul that you want to, but no picture will ever have that impact that causes you to go ‘wow’ when you stand below that dome in person. That is priceless and people will come back for it.

You’re probably sick of rendering dialog boxes with JQuery’s .dialog() function and all of its parameters.

So here’s a tiny little function that you can include in your AJAX application at the top level via a <script></script> tag, and then simply call each time you need to render a dialog. So you can effectively accomplish what you need to do in one line instead of 10.

The function below requires multiple parameters:

1. target_class – This is the name of the class you want the dialog rendered in. It doesn’t have to exist in the DOM, the function will create it.
2. title – The title of your dialog
3. width – The width of the dialog
4. height – the height of the dialog
5. load_file – An external file or view that you want to load inside your dialog
6. buttons – A JavaScript array containing all the buttons your dialog needs. This array should contain a button id and button text, and can be formatted as:
   buttons[0]['id'] = ‘save’ ;
   buttons[0]['id'] = ‘Save this Content’ ;
   buttons[1]['id'] = ‘default_cancel’ ;
   buttons[2]['id'] = ‘button3′ ;
   buttons[2]['text'] = ‘A 3rd Button’ ; 

As shown above, you can add as many buttons as you want using an array.  The function also created a default cancel button that will close and destroy the dialog if you pass the id ‘default_cancel’ to it.

Note that once you have the dialog rendered, you can use more JavaScript driven by the ID of each button to decide what happens when that ID gets clicked. This should ideally go in a JS file tied to the view or page you load into the load_file parameter of the function.

There are several ways to to tweak and improve the function depending on what you are rendering your dialogs for,  so please feel free to make any changes and / or share your thoughts. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

/**
* Function to shorten the amount of JavaScript required to create multiple JQuery UI Dialogs
* Courtesy of Vesica
* This code is provided free of any and all warranties. Please use it at your own risk.
*/

function loadDialog(target_class,title,width,height,load_file,buttons) {
	var loading = $('<img src="' + siteurl + 'images/ajax-loader.gif" alt="loading" class="loading">');

	// Prepare the buttons parameter

    var theButtons = {};
	$.each(buttons, function(key, value) {
		if (buttons[key]['id'] == 'default_cancel') {
			var btname = 'Cancel';
			theButtons[btname] = {};
			theButtons[btname]['text'] = 'Cancel';
			theButtons[btname]['click'] = function(){ $(this).dialog("close") };
		} else {
			var btname = buttons[key]['text'];
			theButtons[btname] = {};
			theButtons[btname]['id'] = buttons[key]['id'];
			theButtons[btname]['text'] = buttons[key]['text'];
		}
	});
	$('.' + target_class).dialog('option', 'title', title);
    $('.' + target_class).load(load_file);
    $('<div title="' + title + '" class="' + target_class + '" id="' + Math.random()*1000001 + '"></div>').dialog({
		modal: true,
		open: function ()
		{
			$(this).append(loading.clone());
			$(this).load(load_file);
		},
		width: width,
		height: height,
		buttons: theButtons,
		close: function() {
			$('.' + target_class).empty();
   	        $('.' + target_class).remove();
        }
    });

}

Once you’ve added the co-ordinates, you can simply browse to your timeline by going to Charts > Timeline. In History / Provenance section, you can also add the date created, which will make sure the object only appears on the map on the selected date. The below video gives you a short glimpse of what the timeline looks like.

The application in question is a single page application, so virtually everything is done via AJAX. The URL receives different parameters via a URL hash, which updates different sections of the page DOM or accesses different parts of the interface, including JQuery UI tabs. These single page, multiple hash URLs can be called via a bookmark URL, or will trigger on a url change in the browser. What’s important to note here is that in an application like this, when you submit data, all you really need to do is change the URL – your hashing managing JavaScript should do the rest for you (in terms of routing your data to the server side, not actual processing). I’ll also show you some JavaScript to deal with JQuery UI tabs after your page loads as working with hashing will disable the default URL behaviour that allows you to call tabs via the URL.

Requirements

If it’s not self-explanatory, you need the following to accomplish this:

• JQuery - http://jquery.com/download/
• JQuery UI - http://jqueryui.com/
• JQuery Hashchange plugin from Ben Alman - http://github.com/cowboy/jquery-hashchange/raw/v1.3/jquery.ba-hashchange.js and http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-hashchange-plugin/

How it works

Here is what we need to cover:

1. Someone either loads a URL in their browser which is part of your single page application (this could be via a bookmarked URL or by simply typing or pasting in the address bar), in which case you simply need to pick up the URL, process, and update the page.
2. Someone performs an action that will change the URL of your application – which should either update a database or update the page, or whatever it is supposed to do in your application.

// The following line will monitor hash changes on the page this JS gets loaded into
$(window).hashchange( function(){
// If the URL has changed, any code here gets executed. For instance, you could alert something:
alert('The URL has has changed.');
});

So if your existing URL looked like http://example.com/#Page1 and you changed it to http://example.com/#Page2 with an <a href> or a <button>, would see the alert box above. Note that if you wanted to to alert something anyway, you would simply put that code outside the $(window).hashchange() function.

This is the easy bit – now for how you would pick up different parts of your URL, splice them up and send them to your scripts as needed to process, and then perhaps load a JQuery UI tab on your page.

Assumptions

Let’s clarify what we have in our example.

We are trying to load a different type of product based on a type parameter, followed by an ID, followed by a bunch of parameters that style the image and options that get displayed for the product.

So, if you were using PHP and building your URL query string, it might look a bit like:

http://example.com/product.php?type=bottle&id=3426&colour=green

If you wanted to load a particular JQuery tab on this page that had the id ‘dimensions’, your URL would become:

http://example.com/product.php?type=bottle&id=3426&colour=green/#dimensions

When the page loaded, JQuery UI would know you want to load the dimensions tab and it would simply make it active.

But using the $(window).hashchange() function above will break this default JQuery UI functionality.

So, our goal, given our single page application, is to be able to reload a certain part of our page based on a URL that looks like the following:

http://example.com/index.php#product/type=bottle&id=3426&colour=green/dimensions

The way to read the above your URL is: Give me the product page with bottle No. 3426 in the colour green and display the dimensions tab on the product page. You could change any of the values above to process different data – so you could have product, category or generic types of pages, hundreds of different products and hundreds of different colours.

Sounds simple enough. This would be accomplished with the following code, and please note, as mentioned above, that to trigger this change for bookmarked URLs or those pasted in the browser you can enter this code outside the $(window).hashchange() function in a <script type=”text/JavaScript”></script> tag directly in index.php (where index.php is the file that runs your single page application) or create a another JavaScript file and include it in your index.php file via the <script> tag. To trigger it with a button click or <a href> change, please wrap it inside the $(window).hash function as shown below. Technically, you can wrap all this code in a function and call that on $(window).hashchange() being executed.

// The following line will monitor hash changes on the page this JS gets loaded into
$(window).hashchange( function(){

    // If the URL has changed, get the value of the URL and split up the different parts
    var postHashUrl = location.hash.substr(1); // this will return product/type=bottle&id=3426&colour=green/dimensions
    var urlParams = urlIdentifier.split('/'); // this will return an array having split up the postHashUrl at the '/', much like the php explode() function would
    var paramType = urlParams[0]; // this will return 'product'
    var paramDetails = urlParams[1]; // this will return 'type=bottle&id=3426&colour=green'
    var tabToDisplay = urlParams[2]; // this will return 'dimensions'

});

The above code now gives you access to to all the different parts of the URL hash, and will do so every time it changes. All you need to do now is use the $.ajax() function in JQuery to process this data, get the results back, and set the active tab as shown below:

// The following line will monitor hash changes on the page this JS gets loaded into
$(window).hashchange( function(){
    // If the URL has changed, get the value of the URL and split up the different parts
    var postHashUrl = location.hash.substr(1); // this will return product/type=bottle&id=3426&colour=green/dimensions
    var urlParams = urlIdentifier.split('/'); // this will return an array having split up the postHashUrl at the '/', much like the php explode() function would
    var paramType = urlParams[0]; // this will return 'product'
    var paramDetails = urlParams[1]; // this will return 'type=bottle&id=3426&colour=green'
    var tabToDisplay = urlParams[2]; // this will return 'dimensions'

    // Post the data to your server side processing script
    $.ajax({
        type : 'POST',
        url : 'my/processing/file.php', // or.aspx or whatever language you are using
        data : "type=" + paramType + "&details=" + paramDetails,
        cache : false,
        success : function(results) {
            // perhaps you want to load these results into a div with id 'myResults'
            $('#myResults').html(results);

            // Finally, if the div that contains your tabs has the id 'tabs'
            $('#tabs').tabs('select', tabToDisplay ); // this will set the active tab to dimensions
            }
    });
});

That’s it, that code should pick up any changes to the URL and process them according to the code above.

As this is JQuery, remember to wrap all of the above code in $(function(){ {); as shown below. I’ve also added the code above outside the hashchange function so you can see how to setup the default page handler as well as trigger it off when the page URL changes.

$(function() {

    // Default processing to process any data when the page loads with a hashed URL
    var postHashUrl = location.hash.substr(1); // this will return product/type=bottle&id=3426&colour=green/dimensions
    var urlParams = urlIdentifier.split('/'); // this will return an array having split up the postHashUrl at the '/', much like the php explode() function would
    var paramType = urlParams[0]; // this will return 'product'
    var paramDetails = urlParams[1]; // this will return 'type=bottle&id=3426&colour=green'
    var tabToDisplay = urlParams[2]; // this will return 'dimensions'

    // Post the data to your server side processing script
    $.ajax({
        type : 'POST',
        url : 'my/processing/file.php', // or.aspx or whatever language you are using
        data : "type=" + paramType + "&details=" + paramDetails,
        cache : false,
        success : function(results) {
            // perhaps you want to load these results into a div with id 'myResults'
            $('#myResults').html(results);

            // Finally, if the div that contains your tabs has the id 'tabs'
            $('#tabs').tabs('select', tabToDisplay ); // this will set the active tab to dimensions
            }
    });

        // The following line will monitor hash changes on the page this JS gets loaded into
        $(window).hashchange( function(){
        // If the URL has changed, get the value of the URL and split up the different parts
        var postHashUrl = location.hash.substr(1); // this will return product/type=bottle&id=3426&colour=green/dimensions
        var urlParams = urlIdentifier.split('/'); // this will return an array having split up the postHashUrl at the '/', much like the php explode() function would
        var paramType = urlParams[0]; // this will return 'product'
        var paramDetails = urlParams[1]; // this will return 'type=bottle&id=3426&colour=green'
        var tabToDisplay = urlParams[2]; // this will return 'dimensions'

        // Post the data to your server side processing script
        $.ajax({
            type : 'POST',
            url : 'my/processing/file.php', // or.aspx or whatever language you are using
            data : "type=" + paramType + "&details=" + paramDetails,
            cache : false,
            success : function(results) {
                // perhaps you want to load these results into a div with id 'myResults'
                $('#myResults').html(results);

                // Finally, if the div that contains your tabs has the id 'tabs'
                $('#tabs').tabs('select', tabToDisplay ); // this will set the active tab to dimensions
                }
        });
});
});

I’ve stated before that you can (and probably should) write a function to do the above so you don’t have to reproduce your code twice – but this should give you an idea of how to handle hash changes and process them.

Tech Talk will be discussing some web based technical implementations that we at Vesica have used in the application and in exteral projects (our team gets to work on several external projects that are modeled after or integrate with Vesica in a variety of industries) – small snippets of code or technical advice that could save you (or your technical team) hours or days if you’re building something similar.

In addition, we’ll be rolling out some videos (not in the Tech Talk but the Using Vesica and Upcoming Features Sections) to demo some of the existing functionality, new functionality (that was released over Christmas and has just recently made it to the features page – https://vesica.ws/features/timeline/), and upcoming functionality like the Research and Bibliography tab.

The first Tech Talk article (coming this Monday) will discuss some JQuery implementations adapted from Vesica for use by one of the applications for the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, the interface for which was inspired by Vesica (and we helped design and build it).

The ability to dissect and print various parts of information about multiple pieces has been a long requested feature from many different clients – so I’m happy to say that we’re there. This year will also see us release 2 more major features – including the research / bibliography tab and the redeveloped interactive maps timeline on mapquest.

See the video demoing the new report printing functionality below or on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_hBWCgcwWM.

Under the new licensing terms, we simply cannot offer Google Maps inside Vesica to our clients without a substantial investment on behalf of each museum that uses Vesica – but this substantial investment will drastically increase our standard pricing of £0.05 per object in a collection, which does not make it feasible. This is a rather major difference in Google’s pricing policy for the Google Maps API – which was free just a few months ago for a specific amount of usage.

We’re now working on integrating Vesica with either MapQuest or BingMaps to bring make the enhanced timeline a part of Vesica along with the two other major updates for this year (the report building tool and the Drupal API).

In the mean time, we will make publicly available a basic version of Vesica’s Google Maps timeline to give you a brief preview of what the functionality does next week. Customers who when prefer to use the Google Maps timeline can have that activated in their accounts for a fixed annual fee in addition to the standard £0.05 per object fee.

If, however, you wouldn’t like to spend extra and can wait a few weeks for a free interactive, map-driven timeline – subscribe to this blog to stay up-to-date.

In the meantime, if you are interested in deploying Google Maps in your organisation or museum with your collections management software fully integrated, please get in touch with us by commenting on this article, calling +44 2081338050 or emailing our sales team at info@vesica.ws.

The report builder will benefit immensely from Vesica’s already powerful search and filter functionality. As it stands, you basically filter, search and drill down in your collection to view objects / pieces by a variety of different parameters – and you get to define and choose these parameters. In the current system, though, you are unable to choose what information about the searched and filtered objects you would like to print on a report. This information is pre-defined and, as such, may not be very useful to all departments in a museum.

But that’s what will change. You will be able to choose what information you want to include on a searched report of objects and pieces, just like you can choose what information you would like to print when creating a detailed object report.

So, illustrated with an example, your current search and filter interface might look like this:

Once you press Search, you’ll get the filtered results. On pressing the print icon on the top right, you’ll be presented with a pop-up allowing you to choose the information you would like to print about each object on the report, as shown below:

Choose and press print or export to word – that’s pretty much all you will need to do to create any report you require. This feature is currently in development and is scheduled for release in November. If you have any suggestions or anything particular you’d like to see implemented along with the report builder, please don’t hesitate to comment and share your thoughts.

Let’s start with a bit of information of TLDs, which is the last part of the domain name as we know it. So, this could be .com, .co.uk, .fr, .uk.com, .net, etc. etc. TLD stands for Top Level Domain. TLDs come in different types, but the common types are:

gTLD – this is a generic TLD and does not tie you down to a specific country or a sponsor. Common ones you are most familiar with are .com, .net and .org.

ccTLD – this is a country specific TLD and also comes in an internationalized variety (this distinction is not necessary here). Examples of such domains include .co.uk, .fr, .es, .br, .us and so on so forth.

sTLD – These are sponsored TLDs. An example of this is .museum. Try http://icom.musuem, for instance.

So what really is the difference? A TLD helps identify the domain name. So you know that a .co.uk means the website belongs to the UK. You know a .museum means the website is a museum or is something related to one.

From a practical standpoint, this can have marketing and SEO level ramifications (and any other level if you are used to blowing things out of proportion). You can argue that from a marketing standpoint, the TLD can be very important. .COM or .NET almost always imply a larger, more dominating internet presence – it’s just how most people have been programmed to react to TLDs. If you are in marketing, this is a big issue. My personal view – it’s really quite important – but its importance depends on what the website in question really does. Most marketing people actually forget to address that more important issue.

Technically, the wrong extension can make or break your efforts. To market any application, it is probably good to have ccTLDs to market in a specific market. This is because Google will always consider a .co.uk extension as a more relevant result on google.co.uk than it will a .com or .fr extension. So it’s not just about the marketing anymore, but the wrong extension might mean the difference between you getting found or not via search engines online.

But what if you run a website or application online that is really not country specific – like Vesica. Sure, we might want to market to different countries and for that we could setup either subdomains like fr.vesica.ws or get domains like vesica.fr, but at the end of the day, the primary language is English and the application itself is always delivered on the vesica.ws domain.

The key to not getting lost on the internet is to get a generic TLD. gTLDs are considered somewhat internationalized, meaning that unless you specifically tell Google to prioritize their searches to one specific country, they are considered equal for all (unless your content really focuses on a geographic location). This is by no means a detailed and comprehensive answer (and there is a lot to this discussion that I am happy to go into should it tickle someone’s fancy) – but it is this particular issue that restricts you to the following TLDS:

• .COM – this is undoubtedly the globally recognized and popular TLD
• .NET – The second best, whatever it technically means (that’s irrelevant)
• .ORG
• .BIZ
• .MOBI
• There are a few more that qualify, and .WS is one of these

Now for answering the real question – why did we choose .WS? Because it is considered a gTLD and was available.

How is .WS a generic name when it is supposed to be a ccTLD for Western Samoa? Well, because an American company bought the rights to rebrand it as .WebSite and for all technical purposes, google considers .WS to be a gTLD. Unlike other gTLDs like .mobi or .tel .asia, .WS (WebSite) does not limit us to a specific medium (like a mobile device or phone) or a specific location (like Europe or Asia).

It simply means WebSite. Whilst it’s not as catchy as .com or .net, it technically can and does serve the same purpose. It’s clear from the Vesica website that we are a website and company based in London – and it’s really quite short and easy to remember.

Are there any other technical issues that can occur if you use such domains? Perhaps – especially if the infrastructure that resolves NS records for your TLD is sitting in a small island nation that doesn’t have the technical knowledge or infrastructure to support global traffic. Luckily, .WS nameservers resolve from all over the world, including the United States and the UK – see http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/ws.html. This is primarily due to the rebranding initiative of Global Domains International. In a worst case scenario where such a spread of infrastructure is not available for your TLD, switching domain names if one does go down isn’t all that difficult as long as you own a few – and a company like Vesica that serves its customers primarily via the internet always has a plan in place to deploy such a backup within hours, if not minutes.

We have an updated list of new features and functionality that will be posted to the coming soon page (https://vesica.ws/features/coming-soon/) next week, so if you’ve been waiting for bibliography and research features along with some advanced file sharing and management, stay put, because it’s all in the mix.

In the mean time, if you’ve been following the news in the museum industry of budget cuts across the board, now is as good a time as any to tell your local museum about Vesica. It well help them with hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few years. What more, using a cloud based solution like Vesica can mean that museums can protect the jobs that matter and spend money where it is necessary (i.e., on conservation) as opposed to maintaining IT.

See http://www.museumsassociation.org/campaigns/01072012-ma-2012-cuts-survey for more details – we’ll have more on these discussions in the coming weeks.

Users will be able to enable their galleries with a pass code. This means that anyone visiting your gallery will need to enter this pass code before they can gain access to the gallery. Future gallery updates will see this feature allowing you to add an additional level of security at the object / piece level. You can then choose to add individual pass codes for each piece in your account when and if you wish to include it in your gallery.

You will also be able to add the weight of an object in the system (where applicable). This option will be available in the Document tab under the Dimensions and Weight section (previously known as Dimensions).

Additional updates will follow soon, along with the release of Vesica in several other languages (see the post about Vesica being released in Spanish last month). To stay up to date with the latest developments and the innovative new functions we are developing to better manage and document museum collections, please see our features one on https://vesica.ws/features/coming-soon/.

As a user, you can set your own preferred language at the account level. This means that whilst you can use Vesica in Spanish, other users who access the account can still choose to see the application in English.

Switching to Spanish is a simple, 3-step process.

1. Once your signed-in to your Vesica account, go to Settings (see screenshot below).

2. In settings click on the Edit User Section.

3. On the left hand panel titled user settings, the last option allows you to choose your language. Make the appropriate choice and press submit – and you’re done.

The system will now keep track of your preferred language each time you sign-in to the same account.

Have more questions? Please comment or raise a support ticket from within your Vesica account.

The answer is yes.

Vesica uses the UTF-8 character set, so all foreign languages – including Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, etc. are supported. This means you can enter information in virtually any language.

The Vesica interface, however, is currently restricted to English. The application is being internationalized, with our Spanish version due for launch in the next few weeks. In due course, the Vesica interface will also be available in several languages.

If you are museum considering Vesica but the English interface stands in your way, get in touch with us and we can get you an ETA on a localised interface.

The next version of the Vesica Interactive Timeline will feature a fully searchable, interactive timeline built on Google Maps. Whilst work has been ongoing to integrate the Google Maps API with Vesica along with other features, we recently had the opportunity to build a simple integration for the Introducing America exhibition at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

For users looking forward to enhancements to the newer timeline feature in Vesica – this is what it will be based on. You’ll be able to select a period and visualize your images in a map, then zoom in to interact with them. You will eventually also be able to further filter the data on this map like you can when you’re searching for pieces / objects in your account. So, in theory, you could ask the map to visualize for you all the objects in your collection between 1820 and 1880, then choose to look at just textiles, and then zoom in to the Far East region and see what you may have in your collections from China on the map.

Once complete, museums will also be able to port the map out to an external website using the API – which can add a new dimension of interactivity to museum websites.

The map for the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center can be viewed here.

Rather than give you a breakdown of how Vesica is different (or better – and you’ll find a comparison chart link at the bottom of the article to this effect), I’ll briefly discuss one simple thing that sets Vesica apart from the competition. Aside from the obvious benefits of a SaaS application – which I discussed in a previous article here – and unlike all other databases or collection management applications in the market, Vesica is unique because it was built with a unique approach. Unlike other applications, Vesica is not just an interface added on top of a database – it is engineered to deliver a user experience. We didn’t really want to create just another Collections Management Database – that’s boring (and a white and depressing dull gray colour) – we wanted to make managing collections a fun, beautiful and enjoyable experience. Of course, on the back-end, we deliver this with a robust database in a world-class data centre (solar powered, mind you), but our interface is built from scratch – a beautiful, synchronised medley of user interface gadgets that will make using collections management software a good experience.

Not only is our interface unique and bespoke, we’ve developed a system that allows us to push the boundaries in terms of innovation. Others rely on, in many cases, open source software and applications, which means that they are restricted with features and functionality allowed within the frameworks they work with, or they would lose the support of such frameworks or open source software.

As one of our clients puts it – “Vesica is really pretty, intuitive and easy to use – unlike other collections management databases.” This is true in fact as much as it is in spirit – Vesica is not just a collections management database – it is so much more and it is always evolving to help museums, collectors and heritage organisations better document and manage their collections.

For more information on what makes Vesica unique, see our feature comparison chart.

Ideal for professionals and companies who work with the museum, heritage, art or cultural sector, the Vesica Partner Program offers a host of benefits to Partners, including:

• Additional, on-going revenue

• PR Opportunities

• Participation in our Webinars and at Customer Events

• And much, much more…

Vesica is a pay as you go, cloud-based collection management software application for museums, collectors and heritage organisations. With unlimited storage, CDWA Compliant data feeds, streaming audio and video, charts and other interactive educational and marketing tools, Vesica offers museums and heritage organisations a SaaS option, enabling  them to save hundreds of thousands of dollars in IT and licensing fees in addition to gaining operational efficiency and increasing revenue streams.

To become a partner, apply today at https://vesica.ws/partners/.

Cropping and annotating with Vesica is easy – next to each image in the “Images” tab when editing a piece, you’ll now see 5 buttons. The third button allows you to crop, the 4th to annotate, as shown below.

When Cropping an image, Vesica automatically saves the cropped version as an additional image, in case you need to retain both the original and the cropped versions. Cropping is really quite simple and intuitive – you select the part of the image you want to crop and press the “Crop” button – Vesica does the rest.

Cropping with Vesica

Annotations in Vesica are stored as additional layers on top of the image, which means your original image remains unchanged. When you view the image in your account, annotations appear as you hover over the image (as shown below). Annotations are not shown in the online galleries within Vesica or on external sites if the image is displayed via an API.

Annotating with Vesica

It’s really all quite simple and as always, the best way to get a hang of it is to start using it! Please feel free to post any feedback or questions, or contact support if you need assistance with the above features.

» Audio / Video with HTML5

The audio and video integration simply adds on top of your existing piece and collection pages. You’ll see audio and video tabs across the top when you add / edit a piece or collection as shown in the screenshot below:

Adding and streaming videos is also really simple. Just click on the + button as shown below to add a video or audio file, and simply click on the file name to start streaming it. You can also change the file name / description, or download it.

You are currently able to upload the following formats:

Audio: MP3, OGG, WAV and WMA
Video: MP4, AVI, MOV, OGG / OGV amd WMV

» Icons

You’ll also notice the use of the pencil and trash can icon in the above screenshots. In this release, we’ve rolled out icons for all common functions, including editing, deleing, saving and printing.

» Printing

In addition to being able to print detailed reports about a particular piece or object in Vesica, you can now pring reports about listings of pieces filtered by virtually any of the parameters. You can do this by running an advanced search report on your main piece listing page. Simply select from the criteria you need and once the results appear, click on the print icon. The screenshots below will show you how easy it is.

1. Click on Advanced Search to bring up the search dialog, choose your criteria and press the Search button.

2. Once your search results appear, just press the Print button to print the results. It’s simple!

Today’s update brings us a step closer towards making Vesica a collection management platform that supports media of all types for museums and collectors.

There’s more to come on additonal planned features – visit https://vesica.ws/features/ for more details or subscribe to our rss feed.

Streaming Video with HTML5

That’s right, you’ll now be able to upload video files in various formats and stream (or download) them from within your Vesica account. You’ll be able to associate these video files with pieces and collections. To start off with, we’ll initially be supporting a maximum file size upload of 1 GB in the following formats: AVI, MOV, WMV, OGG/OGV and MP4. Over time you’ll see more improvement to the video management platform, including the ability to control quality and embed video elsewhere (with or without the API). The best part about streaming video via HTML5 – we can support all modern desktop browsers and most mobile devices, including the iPad / iPhone and Android based phones and tablet PCs. In terms of browser support, you’ll need IE9, FF4+ or the latest version of Chrome / Safari / Opera to stream the files. You can always download and view the files on your desktop as needed.

Audio Streaming Compatibility

In July we added the ability to stream audio files (for your museum / exhibition guides, etc.). We’ve now made some changes to the audio platform, the result of which is that you can upload any of the formats we supported previously, and they’ll play in all of the modern browsers, irrespective of the format. Previously, you were unable to play OGG files in IE 9 and MP3 files in FireFox – this compatibility issue will be resolved with the update.

Interface Changes

Yes, we’re finally adding some dropdowns for easier access to the many settings / configuration pages, the support ticketing system and the FAQs. In addition to that, we’ll be deploying some icons for the buttons you see on the site (like save, edit, print etc.)  to free up more space for your content.

A Word on Data Standards

The technical team has also been evaluating various data standards that are in use by museums across the world. Whilst there are no formal dates, in addition to allowing you to export your Vesica data using the Vesica API, we are also planning on making feeds of your collections and related details available in some of the other formats, like the Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) Lite by The Getty (http://getty.edu). Watch this space for more details on the subject if you’re interested in ‘open’ data for museums.