IMUG meeting at Emerald Hill Heritage Centre

The Inmagic Museum Users Group meeting was held at Emerald Hill Heritage Centre at South Melbourne on Friday 9 May 2014. Twenty-two people attended from a range of organisations including public libraries, historical societies and small museums and archives. The heritage centre was opened in its current location in November 2013 and is located as part of the Emerald Hill Library.  The City of Port Phillip covers suburbs from Elwood to Port Melbourne. Kay, the history librarian, provided an introduction to the development of the heritage centre and its collection and then Sandy spoke about the databases and the digitisation program.

As well as an annual allocation of money for the digitisation of photographs, money is also allocated for the digitisation of newspapers for Trove. Many of the early electoral rolls have been scanned and made available using ISSUU software. An A-Z listing of City of St Kilda correspondence in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century is also available and digitised images are available for some items. The issue of copyright of previously unpublished material was discussed.

Heritage and Art databases have been catalogued using DB TextWorks and the records are then accessed via Spydus, the library’s cataloguing software and incorporated with records of items from the library local history collection. Low resolution images are linked to the catalogue records and copies of images can be ordered.

Additional information about the Emerald Hill Heritage Centre is available at http://heritage.portphillip.vic.gov.au/Home . The catalogue and other digitised resources can be accessed in the Research Resources section of the heritage website.

Many thanks to the staff at the Emerald Hill Library and Heritage Centre for allowing us to visit and especially to Kay and Sandy for showing us part of the collection and explaining how DB/TextWorks is used in conjunction with Spydus to catalogue their collections.