Welcome to the Penn Museum blog. First launched in January 2009, the Museum blog now has over 800 posts covering a range of topics in the categories of Museum, Collection, Exhibitions, Research, and By Location. Here you’ll hear directly from our staff and Penn students about their work, research, experiences, and discoveries. To explore the Museum's other digital content, visit The Digital Penn Museum.
Building Better Search
By: Scott Williams
Have you ever searched for ‘Buddhism’ only to find records which contain exactly ‘Buddhism’ and not ‘Buddhist’, ‘Buddha’, or related concepts like ‘Maitreya‘ or ‘Bodhisattva‘? Frustrating, no? Problem Like many museum’s online collections, the Penn Museum’s first online collection site (launched in January) worked like the previous example and matched the terms a user searched for […]
EMu migration
By: Scott Williams
The Penn Museum has a long history of using technology to help manage our collection. We started our journey toward computerization in 1978, when the museum used a DEC-10 system which could only store the most basic object information (only six fields!). Now, our current content management system, Argus, has hundreds of fields and nearly […]
Automation in action
By: Scott Williams
Maureen: Digitization is iterative. There was a time that every institution with a desktop scanner and a work-study student was scanning every item they could lay their hands on like kids in candy stores, and throwing them up onto the web without thinking much about the user experience. Now that we’re at a point of […]