1: Wish You Were Here Giveaway
by Dan Braceland
This is just a reminder that you can win FREE PastPerfect products throughout the month of December! We will be giving away a different prize each Tuesday starting December 6th. To enter, please send us a postcard with your name, organization, telephone number and email address. For a full list of prizes and contest rules, please visit http://www.museumsoftware.com/WYWHnl.shtml. Send your postcard ASAP to enter. We will announce the winners on Facebook and at our WYWH Web page. Good Luck!
2: Tech Tip: End-of-Year Collections Reports
by Jennessa ReedAs 2011 comes to an end, many organizations take stock of what they have accomplished during the year. This includes identifying what they have added to the collection as well as what they have entered into PastPerfect. Below is a list of just some of the reports that you can use to summarize what your organization has done this year. All of these reports can be found under the Reports section of the Main Menu.
The Accessions List report will give you all of the Accessions that have been entered into PastPerfect. You can narrow down the records that display by Accession Date range or Accession Number range. This report will indicate the total number of Accessions and total number of items in those Accessions for the range you provide. For the list to include a description of each Accession, use the Accessions List with Descriptions report instead.
If you have loaned items from your collection, the List of Loans and Overdue Loans reports from the Outgoing Loans section of the program will help you track what is still out and which loans are due to be returned to your museum. If you have Incoming Loans in your collection, use the Incoming Loans List with Descriptions and Overdue Incoming Loans reports to keep track of what items are borrowed and need to be returned to the lending organization.
For institutions who want just the total number of records that have been cataloged in the program, use the Records Added by User report. Institutions using PastPerfect Security will see each login name listed with a total number of records added per catalog. Users without Security activated will have the totals listed under the name “Unknown.”
Finally, you can run a query (or version 5.0 users can also create a Catalog List) of all items that have a specific Catalog Date range or Object ID range. This will give you a list of all of the items that match your search criteria, and will include the Object ID, Object Name, Description and Home Location. If you have the MultiMedia Upgrade, you can include a thumbnail image of each item on the report.
If you have questions about running these reports, please contact our support office toll free at 1-800-562-6080 or email support@museumsoftware.com.
3: New Years' Past -- Exploring Online Collections
by Jennifer Whitfield
Did you know that our clients are sharing nearly 2 million collection records online, and that you can search across multiple collections using a simple keyword search? A number of our PastPerfect-Online users enabled Google indexing for their sites, and we provide a handy search tool at the top of our PastPerfect-Online Web page (www.pastperfect-online.com). As an example of a search, I typed "New Year" to see artifacts, photographs, archives and library materials that relate to New Years' celebrations. To find results for the phrase, I entered quotes around the words. The results are pages of different organizations' collections of photographs, greeting cards, cartoons, and even items like a party menu and sculptures. Here are a couple of my favorites. Enjoy viewing images and items from New Years' past!
4: Holiday Season ScheduleThe PastPerfect support and sales office will be closed on the following days during the 2011 holiday season.
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