Research

The heart of EMu is its Catalogue, which enables you to document the objects in your care, to organize this information, report on it and aggregate it. The design and implementation of the Catalogue is based on industry standards and world’s best practice. EMu supports your research with a Catalogue designed to manage the broad range of disciplines, from art to zoology, that is characteristic of many museums. Although all disciplines use the same Catalogue, each is provided with an interface tailored to its needs. In fact, EMu is fully customizable to meet the specific and perhaps unique requirements of each museum. A key feature of EMu is the ease with which it can be tailored to the requirements of any collection.

The EMu Catalogue enables you to document:

  • Individual objects.
  • Individual parts of objects, relating them back to a parent object in a hierarchy of parts records, with each in turn able to have smaller parts, and so on.
  • New items derived from an existing object, such as media assets derived from physical objects (e.g. photograph of an engine) or preparations taken from organisms (e.g. skull or tissue sample). In fact, it is possible to capture all your analyses and manage all of your specimen preparations.
  • A single specimen lot record can document sets of specimens: several marine animals kept in a single jar for instance, or a series of insect specimens pinned within the one drawer.

With all data collected in the one Catalogue, the entire collection is searchable (depending on permissions and user privileges). And here one of the strengths of EMu for your research endeavour becomes apparent: capturing the data of multiple disciplines in the one Catalogue facilitates cross-discipline research as it's possible to search across the entire collection and draw or discover associations between disparate but related items.

The scientist user of EMu will discover a range of helpful tools to facilitate research. Chief amongst these are:

  • The Taxonomy module, which records detailed information about taxa. Supporting the complex rules of the synonymy of taxa, the Taxonomy module enables a search for a taxonomic concept under any of its names.
  • The Collection Events and Sites modules, which record information about specific collection localities (field trips and archaeological digs), supported by a Gazetteer, which provides a reference to look up place names. Geo-referencing is also supported, with mapping tools designed to visualize your data.

In short, EMu supports your research endeavour by enabling you to document what there is to know about your objects, to organize this information, report on it and aggregate it. It's on this strong foundation that EMu then facilitates your interpretation of the facts.

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