MUSEUMS WEBSITE

www.hullcc.gov.uk/museumcollections

Hull Museums Service includes nine museums which together attract nearly half a million visitors each year. The museums have a rich and diverse range of collections, including anti-, archaeology, craft and design, fine art, maritime history, social history and transport. A large proportion of the collections are designated as collections of international importance, and are regularly written about and researched.

After selecting EMu, the Hull Museums Service went through a rigorous back capture process for all collection items. This basic data was prepared and loaded into EMu ready for the new documentation team to begin enriching the collection data. The sixteen documentation staff then cleaned the data whilst adding images and narrative material for the Service’s web audience.

The website has a collections and theme focus spanning the nine different museum sites. The general public can browse the Narrative themes, whilst an advanced collections search caters to the needs of researchers and specialists.

The Hull Museums website is driven entirely from the EMu Narratives module and this includes all the quizzes, the stories, image galleries, downloads, plus more. There are currently 115,082 records in EMu, of which 103,581 are available online (90%).

The collections and themes within EMu are now widely available via Google and other search engines. For example, a Google search for Weird + Hull returns a link to the Weird and Wonderful section on the Hull Museum Services site. While the first link listed for a search on Egypt + Hull is to Hull's Egyptian collections.

KEY FACTS: EMu user since 2006 | Museums: ; ; Guildhall Collection; Hull and East Riding; Maritime Museum; Lightship; Streetlife Museum and | Collections include: Archaeology, Natural History, Craft and Design, Fine Art, Maritime History, Social History, Anti- slavery, Transport | Number of Users: 25 | Number of Records: 115,082 | Number of Images: 26,800 |Implementation: 4 months (from project start to going live)