Ever since Omeka Mania first took hold here at AAS, we have delighted in learning about this exhibition publishing platform and helping each other make the most of it. A group of us meet about twice a month to share our progress and help each other out. From these collaborations, AAS has published six online exhibitions in the last year with more to come soon. As our work has progressed, we’ve taken turns teaching each other what we’ve learned. We thought that we might share some of these teaching tools with you.
We consider the slides below for the middle-level Omeka user. There are a number of “getting started with Omeka” resources out there. And the robust Omeka forums certainly can answer questions for programmers and developers. What we have created is for those of us who fall somewhere in between those two categories. From conversations with colleagues and friends both at other cultural heritage organizations and at educational institutions, we suspect that there might be a few others like us out there!
Though we think that these slides might be useful to any Omeka users, we should offer a few caveats. These assume that Omeka is installed in a server that you have some amount of access to (we have no experience with omeka.net). Also, as a special collections library with an excellent General Catalog, we have created very little metadata for our items. Instead, we have pulled metadata from our Catalog and from Aeon, as is detailed in the “metadata” slide deck.
We hope that you find these slides useful. Please feel free to share, use, and reuse as needed. And thanks to our friends at the Roy Rosenzweig for History and New Media for creating this amazing tool and for offering us so much support as we put it to use!
You can view the slides below (also in Slideshare).
- Metadata
- Images
- CSS
- HTML Tables
I can’t even tell you how much I love that you did this, and shared it! It’s a real lifesaver. I would also love to know how an organization like yours manages storage. For now, as an independent project, I store my items directly in Omeka (backing them up in Dropbox, of course). I gather, though, that over the long term I will want to store my files elsewhere, and I don’t know whether it would be good practice to start doing that now (at 300 or so items). Some people seem to use amazon s3.
Anyway, it’s the “best-practice” part of issues like these that, as you note, seems to fall through the cracks of “Omeka for beginners,” on the one hand, and “Omeka for Coders,” on the other. I so appreciate your slides!
Great question about digital preservation, Siobhan! We manage storage for metadata inAAS’s Catalog and for data and images in our internal digital asset management system. Our Omeka installs are on Reclaim servers. Our friends at the Rosenzweig Center recommended Reclaim, and it has been our pleasure to work with them.
We are so happy that you have found the slides useful!