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