Spring is a time for renewal - At CatalogIt, we are continually working hard to renew our product. We have some great new enhancements we are happy to share with you!
First, we have made it easier for our Museum and Organization accounts to utilize the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT). Users can now easily search Getty AAT terms and auto-populate those terms as Profiles in their entries. This is a great addition to the other built in standard lexicons in CatalogIt--Nomenclature 4.0 and the Library of Congress Thesaurus of Graphic Materials. We’ve created a brief video here on our support site showing how to add Getty AAT terms to your Entries.
You will also notice some improvements to the “Other Names” and “Other Numbers” fields. We have added a “type” dropdown to each so you can easily clarify what the Other Name or Number is referencing. For example, you might want to identify your “other number” as an old accession number, a patent or part number, or the donor’s reference number. The fields are still repeating so you can include as many values as you need to and clarify exactly what that name or number is for. You can populate the values in the Type drop down by creating new ones as you need them.
Our engineers have been hard at work creating and testing our new watermarking feature. For our subscribers that are publishing to the web, either through the HUB or using the API, very soon you’ll be able to set the watermark that will appear on the images you are publishing. This will give you the extra assurance you need to ensure your images are not used without your permission.
We are excited to announce the April 1 launch of our newly designed website! Many thanks to designer Terry Cole and the entire team for all of the hard work. We hope that our new website will be a delight to navigate and you will easily and intuitively find all the information you need.
For the first time, we will be changing our pricing to account for the increasing hard costs of providing the high level of service, security, and flexibility for which CatalogIt is known. At the same time, we will be increasing the number of users included in our Museum, Organization, and Conservator plans. Plans will now include a generous amount of storage related to your plan type and size that will accommodate most subscribers’ needs with the option to purchase additional storage.
New pricing starts April 1, 2021 for new subscribers and April 1, 2022 for existing subscribers. For an overview of all new pricing, visit our pricing page. Please contact us at support@catalogit.app if you have any questions about this change.
The California Association of Museums is offering five half-day seminars this Spring. This Virtual Summit Series features panel discussions and case studies from the museum field highlighting topics and issues relevant to the California museum community. CatalogIt is proud to sponsor the Collections Summit--Collections and Community Now--on Thursday, April 8. Please join us!
The full schedule is as follows:
Click this link for more information on the series or to register for any of the summits.
Perhaps one of the most effective ways to safeguard your collection is also the simplest: using a concise and consistent numbering system. Commonplace in all museums, accession numbers (and entry/object ID numbers) create a direct link between an object and its associated information. This unique number is perhaps the most powerful tool in identifying specific objects and tracking their history.
How is this safeguarding your collection? In order to properly care for and plan for the future of your collections, you need to know exactly what you have. Your unique object ID number is the easiest way to link your object with all of the information, location, history, and other data pertinent to that object. While museums have been doing this forever, it is also something private collectors can, and should, employ to track their collections as well. CatalogIt enables you to clearly define your numbering system and assign a unique number to everything in your collection. To learn more about numbering your collection, and tips on numbering systems, visit this blog post.
Situated on 57 acres in the piney woods of Long Leaf, Louisiana, the Southern Forest Heritage Museum includes a complex of National Historic Register buildings preserved from an old sawmill. Among the Museum’s extensive collections are three steam locomotives, a roundhouse, and a belt-and-shaft driven machine shop. In addition to telling the story of early logging and sawmilling in the area, the Museum is also home to important collections relating to the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps in central Louisiana and to the contributions of the area to the nation during World War II.
Visitors can take a ride on a rare M-4 Railbus along two miles of standard gage railroad track!
If you can’t visit the Museum in person, please visit their website or explore their collections on the CatalogIt HUB!
Hello! I’m Joy Tahan Ruddell and I am the Museum & Collections Consultant for CatalogIt. I have been officially working for CatalogIt for a little over a year, but I met Co-Founders Dan and Howard a few years before that, when they were first developing the software. With more than 25 years of collections experience in a museum setting, I have worked with a ton of collections management software. I was blown away by the ease and power of CatalogIt and have been excited to work with them on the usability for the museum client as well as helping them assist the museum and collector users.
I love using CatalogIt not only for my own collection of family ephemera and artwork, but also with my small museum and private clients. Perhaps the largest project I cataloged was for the Paul Wonner and William Theophilus Brown Estate. I was able to comprehensively inventory and catalog thousands of works of art including paintings, works on paper, portfolios and ephemera. I seamlessly uploaded over 10,000 images and organized the collection so that the Estate could then gift everything to a public collection. I am proud to say that my hard work resulted in the entire collection going to the Crocker Art Museum, also now a CatalogIt user for their entire collection!
I very recently inherited boxes and boxes of family photos and ephemera--some dating back to the late 1800’s. I have been slowly photographing and imaging everything with the end goal of sharing everything with my family on the CatalogIt HUB. I don’t know everyone in those photos, but my hope is that by sharing them with my family, we can collectively identify everyone. CatalogIt is helping me hold onto and share my most precious memories so that my family--both current and future--will be able to enjoy these memories as well. You can easily do the same with your memories too!
Under the American Rescue Plan, the National Endowment for the Humanities will distribute $135 million in pandemic relief to cultural institutions and humanities organizations. We hope that those of you that can will take advantage of this valuable resource! Funding details and application information are forthcoming.
Continue to monitor the NEH website for updates on this important initiative.
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