KE Software is a formerly Australian-owned computer software company based in Manchester, United Kingdom, which specialises in collection management programs for museums, galleries and archives. The Axiell Group acquired the firm in 2014.My News Desk

History

KE Software had its origins in investigations into electronic systems for managing natural science collections conducted in the late 1970s under a joint program of the University of Melbourne, the then National Museum of Victoria and the Australian Museum, which led to the development of the Titan Database in 1984. Much of the credit for the development of the project was due to the work of Martin Hallett of the Museum of Victoria which evolved into Textpress, and by 2000, the KE EMu database program. KE Software was bought by Axiell in 2014 and the team merged with the Axiell staff. Axiell continues to sell and support EMu.

Products The firm has two main products: the Ke EMu Electronic Museum management system,Intellectual Property in Australia, Trade Mark Details a collections management system for museums; and Vitalware Vital Records Management System. The first version of Ke EMu was launched in 1997 and uses the Texpress database engine with client/server architecture on a Windows or Unix/Linux server. Ke Emu is consistent with the Dublin Core / Darwin Core standards for archive and museum catalogue metadata.Rebekah Baquiran, 'KE Emu:Getting a Flightless Bird Off the Ground', Field Museum of Natural History "The company’s clients include the three largest museums in the world.:

KE EMu

KE EMu is considered one of the more effective and purpose-designed museum cataloguing programs.Lord, B & Lord, G.D., 1997, The Manual of Museum Management, Rowman, Altamira Press, pp.72-73 particularly in the creation of public interfaces to museum catalogue data.The Museums Journal, Volume 106, Issues 7-12 Museums Association, 2006.Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, Volume 5, AltaMira Press, 2009, pp.152-7

KE EMu was further developed in 1997 as a multilingual platform, which has been utilised in bilingual institutions such as the Canadian Museum of Civilisation.Lucy A. Tedd, J. A. Large Digital Libraries: Principles and Practice in a Global Environment, Walter de Gruyter, 2005 p.120 Subsequently this evolved into Texpress and KE EMu (standing for Electronic MUseum) in 2000, which is "now used across the world in natural science museums with huge collections'".Tim Hart and Martin Hallett, 2011, 'Australian museums and the technology revolution', in Understanding Museums: Australian Museums and Museology, Des Griffin and Leon Paroissien (eds), National Museum of Australia

KE EMu is used by a large number of museums and galleries around the world, including the Smithsonian Anthropological Collection,Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, Volume 48, Smithsonian Institution Press, 2004 American Museum of Natural HistoryHidden Connections, Expeditionary Field Work at the American Museum of Natural HistoryVancouver Art Gallery,Art Museum Libraries and Librarianship, By Joan M. Benedetti, Scarecrow Press, 1 Jan 2007 p.130 New York Botanical Garden,New York Botanical Garden Virtual Herbarium Best Practices Guide the University of Chicago Research Archives,The Oriental Institute, Research Archives, University of Chicago the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia,Fowler Williams and David McKnight, 'Through the Eyes of Louis Shotridge: Sharing Alaska’s Native Tlingit History' A Digital Archive Project at Penn the National Museum of Australia, the Australian Museum,Annual Report, Australian Museum, The Museum, 2002 Museum of Victoria,Lookatmedam, Testimonials 'Museum Victoria', Media Equation Pty Ltd. University of Melbourne Archives, and the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand.

There are over 300 clients, and more than 5000 users of the EMu software worldwide. The program has been described as providing "...comprehensive museum management (collection management plus other administrative needs for a museum), workflow and project management, flexible metadata, various stats and metrics, and comprehensive web interface with support for mobile devices and kiosks"Chris Fincham, head of U.S. operations, Collection management systems: Museums and the Web 2011 7-Apr-2011

KE Vitalware

The firm's vitalware software is used by a number of governments and commercial organisations for managing and accessing large data sets, such as the birth records of the Trinidad and Tobago Registrar General,Corey Connelly, Birth certificate in minutes—minister Trinidad & Tobago Guardian Friday, May 22, 2009 the Government of Anguilla, Ministry for Infrastructure, Communications, Utility and Housing,Government of Anguilla2015 estimates of recurrent revenue, expenditure and capital and the Mississippi Department of Information Technology Services.Mississippi Department of Health Bureau of Public Health Statistics State of Mississippi, USA

Further development

A specialist tracking component for KE EMu has been developed by Forbes Hawkins of Museum Victoria. This enables locations to be barcoded, and data to be updated as items are moved around the stores, or between venues, display, laboratories and other locations. This system has been considered by Museums around the world. Jenny Sinclair, 'Tracking 16 million artefacts', The Sydney Morning Herald May 20 2003 The company has been working with Australian government agencies to digitize birth deaths and marriage registers in order to cross match identity data.Chris Griffith, 'Backlogs of birth, death records prone to ID thefts' The Australian, October 04, 2011 The program has also been used for managing the Australian Plant Disease Database and the Australian Plant Pest Database as the program "...has several features that have proven to be invaluable for a plant disease database".Shivas, R. G., Beasley, D. R., Pascoe, I. G., Cunnington, J. H., Pitkethley, R. N., Priest, M. J. Specimen-based databases of Australian plant pathogens: past, present and future, Australasian Plant Pathology March 2006, Volume 35, Issue 2, pp 195-198

References

External links Collection Trust UK management software comparison chart.