Museum User Group Meeting

Approximately 40 people attended the Inmagic Museum Users Group meeting on Friday 14 May at Schwerkolt Cottage and Museum Complex at Mitcham.

Vicki Evans Jones (President of Whitehorse Historical Society) introduced the Society and its collections and then Vicki Court (Heritage Library, Whitehorse Manningham Regional Library Corporation) spoke about the cataloguing of the museum, general information and photograph collections and how the Society also includes records in the Whitehorse Manningham Heritage Database and in Picture Victoria.

The Whitehorse Manningham Heritage Network is a collaboration between four historical societies in the region and the public library service. As well as the regional database, the societies and the library have collaborated on a number of smaller projects, including Whitehorse Women who signed the 1891 Woman's Petition and Smaller Cemeteries in Manningham and Whitehorse. The latest project is a listing of the names of people from the area who served in the First World War.

The information for each of these projects was recorded in DB/Text Works databases, and then the 'write report to file' option in the File menu was used to save sets of records as html files. Cascading style sheets were used to format the resulting XHTML files. The pages were then linked to an introduction page to form a website. This can be a useful and effective way to publish small sets of data for special projects online.

Exporting records in Delimited ASCII format was also discussed as well as the ability to import entries from Excel into a DB/Text Works database, provided that the column headings match the field names. It was noted that if multiple terms in a field, for example subjects, are used in an Excel spreadsheet, then a symbol such as the pipe ( | ) sign should be used to separate the terms in the field (eg. Cats | Dogs | Birds). See Importing Excel files into Text Works for additional information.

As at all these meetings there was plenty of opportunity for networking, as well as the opportunity to explore the Museum and the purpose-built orchard shed designed for displaying items relating to this important industry in the history of the area.

Melbourne Inmagic User Group Meeting report

On Tuesday 11 May 2010, the SBS Radio Resource Centre staff very generously hosted the Melbourne Inmagic User Group.

Jo Keogh, SBS Librarian, demonstrated the use of their customised installation of Inmagic Genie (Library Suite) integrated with Web Publisher, focussing on search and access to their multi-lingual sound recording library. She highlighted the issues that are addressed in cataloguing in languages other than English as well as the seamless access to their sound recording collection. The insights into providing multimedia resources in a complex and high-demand information service were invaluable. Thanks again to SBS Radio Resource Centre.

Note:The Committee is seeking volunteers to host the next Inmagic User Group meeting in Melbourne. If you would like to extend an invitation to the Inmagic user community to visit your site, please contact Gail Paxman on 9665 7065/email gail.paxman@orica.com; or Jo Keogh on 9949 2213/email joann.keogh@sbs.com.au.