McWane Science Center Utilizes LUNA for Scientific Publication Delivery

Fossil Fishes of Alabama, McWane Science Center

Jun Ebersole, Director of Collections at the McWane Science Center in Birmingham is using LUNA to raise the bar for scientific research and publications.

Institutions receiving public funds are mandated to make their research transparent and for Jun Ebersole’s field of Vertebrate Paleontology  both ongoing research, and depth of research, quickly voids the usefulness of print publications as illustrated by Freshwater Mussels – at 960 pages published in 2008. Eager to explore publication alternatives, Jun utilized LUNA to deliver McWane’s Fossil Fishes of Alabama. With this representation, each entry is a PDF that is linked from an index on McWane’s website.


With the LUNA platform for delivery, Jun is able to update and add new content as it becomes available while sharing links with the ResearchGate portal, with SharkReferences, and Google Scholar without having to commit to a print publication that might require thousands of pages.

Discover NYC tax photos through maps

Back in 2018, LUNA software client, the New York City Municipal Archive (NYCMA) embarked on a project with Luna’s Imaging Services team to digitize 720k nitrate negatives from 35mm still camera film spliced together onto 1000-foot reels. While accessible in LUNA through the NYCMA site, these photos have recently been utilized in 2 GIS projects which illustrate how maps can be utilized for improved discovery.

The first project, by Julian Boilen, Street View of 1940s New York, enables user to locate the tax photos on a 2D map of all 5 boroughs. Users can switch between map preferences and contribute their own Stories about places they know.

The second project, by Daniel H. Watts, Tax Photo: Time Warp, is focused on an area of Manhattan below 14th Street, and utilizes a 3D map for discovery. Daniel works for the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission and created this project as a proof-of-concept for future projects.

Unearthing the research potential of historic maps

On April 19 - 21, The David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University hosted a gathering of the Machines Reading Maps (MRM) team members to unveil the results of the MRM project as illustrated by the David Rumsey Map Collection in LUNA. Over the course of three days, participants presented technical details of the process and solicited input on the future evolution of MRM from a project to a community-supported toolkit.

Read about the potential outcomes for MRM in the Journal of Cultural Analytics, Searching maps by words: how machine learning changes the way we explore map collections by Valeria Vitale PhD, Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities, University of Sheffield and Machine Reading Maps team member.

Collection Sharing Beyond LUNA with the v7.5.2 release

LUNA now supports sharing both LUNA and non-LUNA IIIF collections.

With version 7.5.2 (released in August ‘21) LUNA admins can add any IIIF enabled non-LUNA content to their own LUNA instance. We’ve illustrated this in the LUNA Sample instance where you can see both LUNA shared collections (David Rumsey Maps & AMICA) along with a couple of IIIF collections (Freer Art Gallery & Yale Maps) that are IIIF Activity Stream enabled.

Learn More about the latest release features

LUNA Sample Instance

Full Steam Ahead

Nevada Northern Railway Museum goes Full Steam Ahead with LUNA

While 2020 will notoriously be remembered as the year of the Covid-19 Pandemic, negatively impacting people’s lives and businesses, there are also stories with more positive outcomes. 

Nevada Northern Railway Company

Nevada Northern Railway Company

We love hearing from our clients and were particularly pleased to learn about the favourable outcome achieved by the Nevada Northern Railway Museum. Con Trumbull, the museum’s Archivist, described LUNA as a “saving grace” this year. With the physical museum closed to the public, the staff decided to launch their LUNA instance ahead of schedule. They found that the online presence for their visitors and followers was successful in ways they hadn’t anticipated. “Our digital presence in LUNA enabled us to connect with people around the world and translated to new memberships and donations allowing us to continue to function as a museum in the digital age”, said Con

#11 Courtesy of the Nevada Norther Railway Archives

#11 Courtesy of the Nevada Norther Railway Archives

With people working from home, reliance on web based software has become essential and reaching audiences through an online presence is more necessary than ever. Learning that LUNA played a positive role in Nevada Northern Railway Museum’s ability to continue operations reinforces our commitment to supporting our client’s needs and our ongoing development of the LUNA toolset to make it easy to promote content for meaningful audience engagement.

LUNA Collection Sharing & Categorization

Our November 2020 release reintroduces the LUNA Community to collection sharing. With v7.5, LUNA Admins can easily Share and Receive LUNA IIIF enabled collections. To illustrate this feature we’ve updated the LUNA Commons. Through the use of the IIIF Discovery API and the IIIF Activity Stream collection sharing is now dynamic.

More than just a pretty facet!

More than just a pretty facet!

LUNA Collection Sharing & Categorization

Sharing
 - Share and Receive LUNA Collections
LUNA Admins can make collections accessible and add content to share with their users.

Categorization
- Group Collections together to enhance access
With Collection Categorization, LUNA Admins can organize collections to streamline delivery and encourage discovery.

LUNA Open Collections

Earlier this year, we announced there were over 625 public collections in LUNA. To our delight, that number has grown in the last 8 months to 670 collections with 3.7 million media items! Consequently, we’ve also been receiving questions from many of you asking how to get access to this wealth of collections. 

In response to this overwhelming interest in collection sharing, we will be implementing a method to share collections in LUNA 7.5 for scheduled release in December of 2020. Think of the LUNA Commons, but easier to manage and with way more variety.  

update: to see how shared LUNA and non-LUNA collections can be represented in your LUNA instance see our LUNA Sample Instance illustrating the 7.5.2 release

To help us improve this resource, please send an e-mail.

And be sure to follow us on Twitter @LunaImaging. 

Introducing LUNA Learning Segments

LUNA Learning: Quick video overviews of LUNA updates and workflows starting with the 3 new features introduced August 2019  - LUNA Release v7.4.3

1 – Enhanced User Analytics
Introduced in LUNA v7.4.3, we enhanced Google Analytics for more comprehensive LUNA Viewer usage reporting. To achieve this, we're using Google Tag Manager.

2 – LUNA Viewer Updates
A beta version provides the collection admin with a choice of LUNA viewer Detail Views. What was optional in the LUNA Detail View is now a preference controlled by the collection admin enabling the admin to set Mirador's IIIF viewer as a default.  The mirador viewer exposes LUNA collection level annotations to IIIF and makes use of Open Sea Dragon for smooth zooming.

3 – Item Level Restrictions in LUNA
Collection owners and Super Admins may now restrict access to media items or media items and records in a collection, then grant access to those restricted items to a smaller set of users or credentials. 


Celebrating 25 years! Hundreds of Public Collections & Millions of Images in LUNA

For 25 years, Luna has been helping our clients bring their digital media collections to life through our LUNA software. In roles as software developers, service providers, and digitization specialists we have been exposed to some amazing content along the way.

This started us wondering, just how many special collections are exposed to the public in the LUNA Viewer?

To our delight and astonishment, we discovered that there are nearly 3.5 million media items on public display from over 625 different collections (...and counting)! That doesn’t even account for the numerous private collections that exist.  

As a result, we’ve decided to start showcasing all those years of hard work and effort that our clients put into making valuable resources available to the world. Follow us on Twitter for Featured Collection Friday, as we highlight a different collection every week.

This week’s featured collection is the Medieval Collection from the University of Manchester. The Special Collections Division of The University of Manchester Library holds outstanding collections of rare books, manuscripts and archives from the Middle Ages. Our Medieval Collection contains complete works of paramount importance in a variety of key subject areas, including History, Theology, Art, Literature, Language, and the History of Science and Medicine.


Whether you are into music, murals, art, history, photographs, manuscripts, science, computers, postcards, or just about anything else, a wealth of content awaits your discovery.
If you are interested in seeing the full list of public collections, you can also check out the Collections in LUNA page on our web-site!

Around and Around: 720,000 images on 130 reels – digitized + delivered

Long-time LUNA software client, the New York City Municipal Archive (NYCMA) embarked on a project with Luna’s Imaging Services team to digitize 720k nitrate negatives from 35mm still camera film spliced together onto 1000-foot reels.  

The best photographs don’t tell the whole story, but instead provide hints that kick start the imagination and encourage it to build its own story.  For the casual viewer of the New York City Municipal Archive photo collection there are thousands of such hints that do exactly that. The original targets of the project, the taxable buildings and properties of the five boroughs of New York City, are interesting themselves, but it’s the images of the people who have accidentally stumbled into the camera’s frame that are the truly fascinating gems.  The clothing, the hair styles, the faces… this is is the real 1940’s. It’s the undiluted human honesty of the unplanned. As one looks at these moments in time, these imperfect souls from a different era, accidentally caught on the periphery by the camera’s lens, the imagination can not help but weave life stories around these involuntary time travellers.

LA as Subject - Archives Bazaar - Save the Date - October 20

In all, more than 70 archives are represented at this event, which is free and open to the public.

In all, more than 70 archives are represented at this event, which is free and open to the public.

We at Luna Imaging are excited to once again participate in the annual Los Angeles Archives Bazaar! 2018 marks our tenth year of support and attendance at this wonderful event.

For more than 20 years, the L.A. as Subject consortium has brought to life the diverse, often hidden stories that make Southern California such a fascinating place of discovery. In 2005, the consortium inaugurated the Los Angeles Archives Bazaar to give anyone with an interest in the region’s history a one-stop opportunity to interact with dozens of archives, from large institutions to private collectors.

Click on the image to download PDF or Learn More at the event website