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William Real
Posts:47
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| 20-01-2010 1:45 AM |
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Hi everyone,
Here are some scenarios that come up regularly:
1. Several permanent collection galleries have been deinstalled for a temporary exhibition. Later, when the galleries are to be reinstalled, someone asks, "can we have a list of objects that were in those galleries right before we deinstalled them?"
2. The Director wants to know: how many works of art were on view at any point during the year 2009? Compared to 2008?
I can sort of imagine the logic required to perform these queries, but I can't fathom how one would put it together in emu. I am guessing one would have to construct a TexQL query using EditQuery. I have written fairly simple TexQL queries but nothing this complex.
Does anyone know how to do this?
Thanks,
Will |
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Ben Sullivan
Posts:5
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| 20-01-2010 9:58 PM |
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Hello Will,
Unless I am missing something I don't think you will need to do any advanced queries. I am presuming you are using the standard Locations management tools in EMu, including Internal Movements. If so you can search on a specific location or attach a list of locations (in your case these may be the exhibition areas) and limit it by the date an object was moved there.
Scenario 1
>>Several permanent collection galleries have been deinstalled for a
>>temporary exhibition. Later, when the galleries are to be reinstalled,
>>someone asks, "can we have a list of objects that were in those
>>galleries right before we deinstalled them?"
1 Open Internal Movements and in *Search* mode attach the relevant temporary exhibition locations to the 'Locations' field (if anyone needs help with attachment searches look up "Run a search using an attachment field" in the EMu Help).
2 Then add your date range search in the 'Date Moved' field (see "Range Searches" in Help).
3 Click the Search button and you now should have a list of object movements within that date range.
4 Change your List view to include the "Object" field and you have your list of Objects that were in those locations during that date range. You can then select this list and copy these to Excel if you want to do any more analysis.
Scenario 2
>>The Director wants to know: how many works of art were on view at any >>point during the year 2009? Compared to 2008?
1 You would do the same process as above except attach all the "view" locations and have a range >=1/1/2008 <=31/12/2008
2 Copy list of objects and paste into Excel
3 Do the same for the 2009 range
3 Use Excel to do a comparison between the two lists
I hope this is of some help
Kind regards,
Ben Sullivan
KE Software UK |
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Ben Sullivan
Posts:5
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| 20-01-2010 10:16 PM |
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Will,
A quick follow up - I just realised that this won't give you all the information you need as it is relying on the "Date Moved" not whether an object is already in that location. As such if an object is already on display prior to the date range it won't be included. In addition to the objects moved during the date range you will probably need to include a list of objects that were already in those locations during that period.
How are you managing the movements and locations in EMu at the moment? Is it through the standard Locations module?
I will have more of a think about it.
Kind regards,
Ben |
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Ben Sullivan
Posts:5
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| 21-01-2010 1:08 AM |
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Hello Will,
I think I should probably stop meddling with EMu and let real users answer these types of questions. However here is my attempt to help you out regardless.
I had a think about this and there are basically 3 types of records you need to find:
Objects moved to display location during time frame
Objects on display already but moved prior to end of time frame
Objects on display already and not moved since
There may be simpler methods but I tested this out with different data and it seemed to work.
Attached is a setp by step walkthough based on my testing.
Good luck with it.
Kind regards,
Ben
KE Software UK
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Attachment: Objects-on-display.doc
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David Smith
Posts:24
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| 21-01-2010 2:11 AM |
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Hi Will,
I think Ben is on the right track...
Internal Movements records document the Location where an object is moved TO rather then FROM.
So, assuming that during the recent de-installation, all works of art that were removed had their EMu Current Location updated to reflect that they are no longer in the gallery, then an Internal Movement record for each of those items will have been automatically created. This Internal Movement Record contains a reference to the NEW location rather than the OLD one. So lets say for the sake of this discussion they were moved to "Location X". To find those records you will need to search the Internal Movements Module where the Location = "Location X". If this storeroom is used frequently, then you will need to filter the search by date moved[either actual date(s) moved, or approximate date range the record was edited].
Having retreived you're umpteen Internal Movements, you can report directly from there or retreive all the Catalogue records (Select --> All records; Place cursor in Object field; View -->View Attached -->Selected records) and report from there.
If you don't already do so, for the future, to better answer the kind of management KPI questions being asked, you may like to consider documenting each of the Exhibits as an Event and attach all the objects in that Gallery to the Objects Tab on the Event record. You can record the commencement date and completion date (de-installation date), which will make searching much easier.
e.g. which exhibits i.e. Events (and thus objects on display) were there in 2009 (date commenced<1/1/2009, date completed>1/1/2009)
I'm sure there are other institutions, who may wish to contribute to this thread, that have developed their Events Module beyond the 'default' to better manage the flux of specimens on display.
Scenario 2
>>The Director wants to know: how many works of art were on view at any point during the year 2009? Compared to 2008?
I can empathise with the difficulty of this one. I get asked to provide KPI data for loans.
"How many loans were active during the financial period 2008-09?" This is not as simple as it sounds and actually requires 4 queries:
1. Loans started before 1/04/2008 and still open by 31/03/2009.
2. Loans started before 1/04/2008 and closed by 31/03/2009.
3. Loans commenced after 31/03/2008 and closed by 31/03/2009
4. Loans commenced after 31/3/2008 and still open by 31/03/2009
The query looks something like this:
select all
from eloans
where true and
((InfDateClosed > DATE '31/03/2009')and(DatLoanProcessedDate < DATE '1/04/2008'))
or
(((InfDateClosed > DATE '31/03/2008')and(InfDateClosed < DATE '1/04/2009'))and( DatLoanProcessedDate < DATE '1/04/2008'))
or
(((InfDateClosed > DATE '31/03/2008')and(InfDateClosed < DATE '1/04/2009'))and( DatLoanProcessedDate > DATE '31/03/2008'))
or
((DatLoanProcessedDate > DATE '31/03/2008')and(InfDateClosed > DATE '31/03/2009'))
Without EditQuery you would have to run each of these queries independantly and add each of the results to a group to see them all.
Am I getting close to the nub of the problem with your scenario???
Because this is a quarterly request, I don't want to have to write out this query each time so I have written these queries into a 'record select' within a crystal reports. The report is run on all loan records. Parameter fields in the report require the user to enter the period they wish to report on e.g.2008 -2009, which automatically filters out other loan records and then from the remaining records a series of formula within the 'record select' function to preserve only those records for which the above 3 criteria apply.
Don't know if I've truly answered your question, Will, but I hope some of the suggestions here help.
cheers
Dave Smith
NHM, London |
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