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PastPerfect
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June 2006 Newsletter 1.
"Wish You Were Here!" Support Contest Winner.
We want to thank each of you who sent us a postcard to enter in our "Wish You Were Here!" support contest! We received 193 entries from all over the country! The randomly selected winning institution for the Annual Support Contract is the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles, California! For more information about purchasing an Annual Support contract, please go to http://www.museumsoftware.com/support_options.htm.
The 2006 Training Classes are well under way! As more dates and locations are scheduled, they will be added to the listing below. To find out more information about the scheduled training classes or to inquire about possibly scheduling a session in your area, please contact our Training Coordinator, Amy Dunn, by phone at 610-304-0973 or by e-mail at training@museumsoftware.com. Corsicana, TX Syracuse, NY East Lansing, MI Lexington, KY Oberlin, OH Richmond, VA Be sure to check out our website at www.museumsoftware.com/training.htm for additional training dates and other information! 3. Free Updates for PastPerfect Museum Software Did you know updates
are available from our website for your PastPerfect Museum Software
version 4.0? These free updates are released every two months or so
and are available for download by going to this page on our website:
www.museumsoftware.com/software_updates.htm. If you would rather
receive a free update CD, please contact our Support Office toll free
at PastPerfect Version 4- New Update Available 4.0C5 The new update now available for PastPerfect version 4 is 4.0C5. New features in this update include: * Add Multimedia
links to Contacts If you have comments or suggestions for PastPerfect version 4, please e-mail your ideas to suggestions@museumsoftware.com. We are eager to hear your comments and learn ways that Pastime Software can better serve our customers. 4.
Look Who's Using PastPerfect: Granite Falls Historical Museum
A special Thank You goesto board member Fred Cruger for helping with this month's Look Who's Using PastPerfect! In 2003, the Granite Falls Historical Museum staff organized a historical lecture series to celebrate the community's centennial. The community of Granite Falls embraced the lecture series, and many community members became interested in the historical photographs that were presented. With the increased interest, the Granite Falls Museum wanted to boost the accessibility and research capabilities of their collection. Using PastPerfect, the Granite Falls Historical Museum enlisted a team of motivated high school students to scan high resolution images into PastPerfect and entering data into the catalog records. The Museum/School partnership was a success, with over 4,000 images added to PastPerfect in nine months. Fred Cruger, board member at the Granite Falls Historical Museum, says that while PastPerfect provides outstanding collection management, it's even more appreciated by museum patrons as a research tool. Recently, a team of local college students had made it possible to overlay historic maps with aerial photographs and modern surveys. They used PastPerfect to research historical photographs to include as a "What would I have seen if I was standing here 100 years ago?" feature. Now with the addition of PastPerfect-Online, most of the 5,000 images in their collection can be viewed online. In just a few short weeks, Granite Falls Historical Museum's PastPerfect-Online site has caught the attention of history enthusiasts statewide, and has encouraged new donations of items for the Museum's collection. Fred states that PastPerfect has enabled the Granite Falls Historical Museum to become a major contributor to tourism, education, and community involvement in their region. In January 2006, the Granite Falls Historical Museum was awarded the Malstrom Award for the Museum's Historical Collection Modernization Project. This award is presented annually to an organization that is doing the most to promote preservation in Snohomish County, Washington. This month they will be presented with the Award of Excellence by the Washington Museum Association, which is given to one institution in the state per year. For more information about the Granite Falls Historical Museum, visit their website at http://www.gfhistory.org. You can view their photographs collection online by going to http://granitefalls.pastperfect-online.com. 5. Tech Tip: How to use special characters in PastPerfect! Recently, some PastPerfect users have asked if they can include special characters in their PastPerfect data, particularly accented and umlaut vowels. Using these characters is possible in PastPerfect, and you can add these special letters and characters to your data in just a few easy steps. The best way to add the characters to your PastPerfect data is to use the Keystroke shortcuts that are provided by Windows. To add the character to a PastPerfect field, you would press down the ALT key on your keyboard while entering a four digit number. When you release your ALT key, you will see the character on your screen. For example: If you wanted to add the letter ü to a word in your description, you can use the ALT key and the number 0252 together. Some of the other popular characters that you can use are: © (copyright)-ALT
0169 A more complete list of the characters that can be used in PastPerfect can be found on our website at http://www.museumsoftware.com/tech_tips.htm. 6. Tech Tip: Put video clips on your Virtual Exhibit or PastPerfect-Online website! Getting your collections on the World Wide Web is simple using Virtual Exhibit and PastPerfect-Online. Did you know that you can also add links to video clips of your online collection? It's true, and it's easy to accomplish! To link a video clip to your PastPerfect-Online or Virtual Exhibit pages, you will first need to upload your video files to your web server. Once that is accomplished, you can enter a hyperlink code for each video to the appropriate catalog record in one of the custom fields. The last step is to update your records in Virtual Exhibit and PastPerfect-Online and upload the updated pages to your website. More information about these tech tips and detailed steps can be found by going to our website at http://www.museumsoftware.com/tech_tips.htm.
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