Another one bites the dust

 

I decided that it really was time that my Alcatel Pixi 7 (Android 4 no less) went to the great network in the sky, otherwise known as the local e-waste centre.

I always liked the (paper) notebook sized format, and I still use the old iPad mini I bought to replace it as a  lightweight note taker.

I'd originally bought the Pixi as cheap portable device, to replace my original no name Chinese  7" tablet and keyboard combo.

I added a minature  keyboard to the Pixi, and hey presto, I had a note taker.

All this happened while I was still working and to be honest, I had last seriously used it as a note taker in 2015 before I retired, although it did have a few outings to Albury Library for a bit of research.

Anyway, time to let go. It was simply gathering dust. It took a long time to boot up - so long that I thought it might have hung, and once booted, I did a factory reset on the device to wipe it.

Bizarrely, after I wiped it, it booted up in Spanish ...

e-Hive, a Trip Report

 Yesterday, I went to a presentation at Albury Library Museum about e-Hive, a cloud based digital asset management solution targeted at small and medium sized museums.,

In my experience most museum solutions are overly complex products requiring in house expertise to manage and administer. In the case of paid for systems, there is of course support available, but again they tend to assume the existence of a dedicated in house team. Open source systems can be worse, because, like taking on a cat, taking on an open source system means that you are committing to dedicating sufficient resources to maintain the system over its lifetime.

In the case of most small and medium sized museums, the budgets are (usually) simply not there for the procurement and installation costs, and in this time of uncertain funding the recurrent funding for either support contracts or to sustain a team of system geeks can be problematical.

e-Hive claims to provide a lower cost access model with a web based solution where you are effectively sharing your support costs with other insititutions, leaving you free to concentrate on the asset management component of the job.

There are different tiers, with the cost of the subscription based on the number of objects, including a free tier limited to a few hundred objects to allow you to exepriment with the system to see if it will do the job for you.

e-Hive is produced and supported by Vernon systems, who also produce a full featured museum management system, and much of the e-hive product is derived from their museum management system.

e-Hive is gaining considerable traction among smaller museums in both Australia and New Zealand, and locally by institutions on both sides of Murray in Victoria and New South Wales. The National Trust has also recently implemented a Vernon systems solution and the data I am creating cataloguing LakeView is being recorded in a format compatible with Vernon systems, so I was curious to learn a bout e-hive, given it close relation to the Trust's CMS and the possible adoption of e-hive by the Stanley Athenaeum.

The system basically presents to the enduser as a series of web based forms, with the object data neatly separated from the acquisition and provenance data. There does not seem to be any user accessible means to load data programmatically, although Vernon systems will import your data for a fee.

This is different from the full featured solution where the Trust has been importing my data from Dow's, and the LakeView survey spreadsheets.

Data is stored in the cloud, exactly where was not clear, and this would need to be specified in the case of culturally sensative information.

It is possible to record the conservation data of the object, and any associated conservation plan.

It is possible to generate reports either as PDF, XML and CSV - the CSV report, while not including images of the objects is perhaps one that would be run every week or so to provide a local backup of the content lodged in the system.

While there needs to be some due diligence about the location and ultimate ownership of the data the product looks to be a more than viable solution to the problem of digital asset management in small and medium museums.

My notes of the presentation are available online as a pdf.

Technical note

I used my eMMC based Ubuntu machine to take notes. With a theoretical battery life of more than five hours it was more than adequate for a two and a bit hours presentation.

Notes were created using Focuswriter in ODT format, and I cleaned and prettied them up afterwards using Libre Office

Making a contact sheet

Up at the Athenaeum, Donna, one of my colleagues asked me if I knew how to make a contact sheet on Windows.

I didn't, and googling didn't help as everyone assumed that you had PhotoShop.

Well, we're a voluntary organisation and we fund everything out of our own money - yes there's some grant funding, that's paid for some things, and a photocopier cum printer cum scanner as funding in kind by the local council, but computers, software and the like we pay for ourselves.

computer generated contact sheet produced by yours truly

But when I got home, I thought, maybe I can do this on Linux.

So what's a contact sheet?

Well, in the old days of 35mm photography, often you would cut up your negatives into strips of four or five images, lay them out on a sheet of photographic paper and make a print showing the images in minature - a contact sheet as in this one from wikipedia

You would then look at the images through a magnifying glass and choose which one to print - in movies about journalists in the twentieth century there's often a scene where they squint at a contact sheet to find the image showing the bad person handing a bribe to the corrupt person after they've been on a stake out.

When everything went digital contact sheets disappeared - much easier to flick through the pictures using an image viewer.

So why a contact sheet?

Well, we have a large number of digitised images, and the idea was to group the images together, and put the contact sheets in a binder to let visitors - often family history researchers - look through to see which images we have and request copies.

As everything is done for 23c and stick of chewing gum and we don't have everything online or a front end to let people search, this struck us as a simple lowest common denominator solution.

So when I got home, I did a little digging and found that the montage command in Image Magick would do the trick. 

Put the images in a directory and run something like

montage *.JPG -label '%f' -background 'gray' -fill 'white' -geometry 450x450+2+2 -tile 4x6 ~/Documents/contact.png

to generate a suitable image like the one at the top of this blog post.

Now, obviously Donna is not going to go out and install Linux on a pc just to do this.

However, Image Magick also has a set of Windows binaries, so the next stage was to install them on my work machine.

The tools are all command line based so running the command from a scratch directory

C:\somehwere\scratch> magick montage *.JPG -label '%f' -geometry 450x450+2+2 -tile 4x6 contact.png

produces a very similar image to my original Linux experiment

There's only one thing I havn't got quite right the -label argument isn't adding the filename as I thought it would. As I don't get an error message I'm guessing I've misunderstood something, and I need to populate the filename list somehow ...

[Update 04/08/2024]

Facepalm moment! I was being too clever, montage not only wanted the filenames (not the filenames including the full paths to the locations) and the filenames need to follow the -label directive,  so the command that works is actually

C:\somehwere\scratch> magick montage -label '%f' *.JPG -geometry 450x450+2+2 -frame 10 -tile 4x6 contact.png

which provides an image like this

simple once you know how!

Powerbanks and the lightbox

 Bit of a 'Duh!' moment this one.

Up to now I've used the $25 Temu lightbox plugged into a USB adapter which was then plugged into a wall socket or an extension board.

And this is fine, in fact in my work bag I always take a power board with USB sockets with me.

But sometimes there's no convenient wall sockets, especially in older buildings such as Lakeview, and you don't really want to be trailing 5 or 10m extension leads all over the place.

And then I had my goldfish moment. The light box is basically only a couple of LED strips in a plastic enclosure, meaning it'll run fine off a powerbank, which is basically just a big battery. (We have one for emergencies when the power is out to ensure we can keep a phone or portable internet modem charged).

But as well as emergency backup, you can use the powerbank as a portable power source - simple really.