1. The Caught and Coloured website: its EMu origins Alex Chubaty – Collection Information Systems Craig Churchill – IT Software Development Museum Victoria

2. 2 www.museum.vic.gov.au/caughtandcoloured

3. 3 Background Documents the illustration of fauna in colonial Victoria in The Prodromus of the Zoology of Victoria Collection of artwork and manuscripts held in MV Archives Website managed by MV Online Publishing team

4. 4 Basic Data structure Data used in website collected initially for purposes of collection management Two kinds items catalogued Parent/Child structure of records

5. 5 Parent record Child records

6. 6 Data collection Complex data set capturing information relating to science and art Used Catalogue, Parties, Bibliography, Taxonomy, Collection Events & Sites, Multimedia (MMR) and later, Narratives modules Partitioning/tab switching Early data recorded first in spreadsheet then transferred to EMu

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9. 9 EMu records and relationship with website Data and images collected in EMu used in ‘Collection’ section of website Searchable under headings or groupings of types of fauna Once a faunal group is selected individual species as represented in drawings, prints and notes can be browsed

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12. 12 Additional data linked to Catalogue Some data added to MMR records used in website: 1.Title field = Caption 2.Metadata tab = alt tag

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14. 14 Additional data linked to Catalogue Other types of data added to Narratives module and linked to Catalogue records: 1.Narrative about the faunal group 2.McCoy’s description of species in the Prodromus 3.Kate Phillips’ description of species from Melbourne’s Wildlife Numbers 2 & 3 flagged in Narratives Identifier field Number 1 has relevant Catalogue records attached

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17. 17 Other sections of website using Narratives 1.McCoy’s Zoology of Victoria 2.Natural Observations 3.Stories from Nature Each section a Master Narrative with several sub Narratives Each sub Narrative may have its own sub Narrative Associated images also entered into MMR and linked to the Narratives records

18. 18 Master NarrativeSub Narratives

19. 19 Getting Data out of EMu EMu reports created using select data Separate reports for Catalogue, Narratives and MMR records Reports exported in Excel format

20. 20 Into SQL Server Perl script reads Excel reports and loads data including images into SQL Server –Creates a table for each module and necessary relationship tables Ecatalogue EcatalogueMultimedia –Captures values in labelled text fields and loads into separate fields –Attempts to identify Scientific names and surround with tags Not a fully automated process, takes approximately 30 minutes to update data

21. 21 Out to the Web ASP.NET environment using VB.NET Images served directly from database and resized dynamically (thumbnails) XML tags in data converted to html or using as processing instructions –eg converted to

22. 22 Marking Up the Content Storing HTML in EMu –Is this a good thing to do? –What are the alternatives? -a less intrusive mark-up like WikiWikiWeb c2.com/cgi/wiki -store HTML in EMu put don’t display -use XML instead Storing XML in EMu –What Schema should we use Should we create our own? Investigate existing Schemas –Text Encoding Initiative http://www.tei-c.org/ –Use XSLT PageView to preview

23. 23 Scientific Names Requirement “ All scientific names should be italicised when displayed on the web.” Problem “ How do we identify scientific names contained within a text field if they haven’t been tagged?”

24. 24 Scientific Names (cont) Possible solutions Cross reference/link text against taxonomy module Check text against a pre-build list TaxonGrab – Natural Language Processing solution written in PHP: http://sourceforge.net/projects/taxongrab FindIT - parses freetext and identifies scientific names and author combinations: http://names.mbl.edu/tools/recognize.php Currently testing this technology, initial results are promising

25. 25 Future Possibilities Hit EMu directly, no more exporting data to SQL Server –Use KE PHP web and web services libraries record extractor object xml, xslt and xpath Investigate professional XML authoring tools to allow authors to create narratives that are valid and well formed