Omeka is a content management system developed by an IMLS grant to manage digital content for libraries, museums, and cultural organizations. The original version of Omeka, or Omeka Classic, contains a single-site installation and is a good solution for a single library or other entity to showcase one or more collections of digital content. The newer Omeka S version is a multi-site installation that can hold one very large pool of items that can be shared through one or more sites from the same installation.
Successes
- The newest version of Omeka S 1.3 is installed on the Park Street Foundations Bluehost server for the sole purpose of learning more about the platform.
- All freely-available (4) themes are installed for all sites on the installation.
- Each theme has its pros and cons…
- Many modules (plugins) have been installed:
Modules
- Collecting: Allows for front-end user item submissions.
- Pros: It allows anyone to submit a photo, digital object, etc.
- Cons: It does not appear to grab all of the metadata submitted and display it properly. Also, I have not figured out if it is possible to hold submissions for moderation.
- More testing and configuration required. There is an excellent chance that I have not set it up correctly.
- CSV Import: Allows for metadata in the form of a .csv spreadsheet to create new items.
- Not tested yet.
- Custom Vocab: Allows admins to enter a comprehensive set of terms to create a controlled vocabulary for one field of Dublin Core metadata.
- I was able to quickly grab a column of town names from a spreadsheet and enter in every NH town as a controlled dropdown vocabulary.
- Copyright statements added.
- More testing needed to see if controlled vocabularies can be the only option available for some fields for enduser submissions. Normally, the person adding the item has to drill down and around to find the controlled vocabulary.
- Hide Properties: Similar to “Hide Elements” plugin for Classic Omeka.
- For instance, the issues of the Troubadour have been OCR’d allowing names, places, subjects, etc. to be found in the full-text search of the site — but the OCR is ugly.
- To hide the OCR from the public, I used the DC:ToC field (sorry) to hold the OCR and then hid it from public view.
- The result is that the text from each issue is generally searchable from the site’s main search box, but the OCR remains hidden from public view.
- Verdict: I love this.
- IIIF Server: Used for the Universal Viewer
- Mapping: Allows the contributor to add a marker to a specific location on a map, annotate the marker, and add a photo.
- Example here. Note: The full-screen placement for the map is not good with the current theme. It looks better in a mobile format.
- Metadata Browse: Allows admin to turn on “linking” between all items with the same “tag.” (For lack of better description.)
- Pros: Easy to use and set up.
- Cons: Turned off because of a weird conflict between it and the Universal Browser.
- Omeka 2 Importer: Allows admin to import digital content and metadata from a Classic Omeka (version 2) site via an API key.
- This worked well, but perhaps more testing is needed for the purpose of fully understanding the metadata mapping. (Disclosure: I am horrible at entering and using metadata.)
- I only had a small quantity of items to import. More testing is required on importing larger collections.
- PDF Embed: Allows PDF documents to become embedded and scrollable in the item page.
- It works great, but it would be nice to have the option to increase or decrease the size of the embed (without digging into the code).
- User cannot search within the OCR’d PDF document.
- Example here.
- Universal Viewer: Allows enduser to zoom into an image and allows for searching of an OCR’d PDF.
- The viewer itself works great, aside from a possible conflict with Metadata Browse.
- The placement of the viewer is really wonky, as it is added as another element to the item page instead of replacing the default view of the item.
- It is possible to comment out/replace the standard item from the Omeka item page code, but since we might not have access to future Omeka code on a hosted server, I did not make any changes.
My weak area is metadata. I am hoping that someone from the metadata team can help to create some sample resource templates and give suggestions for the controlled vocabularies.
Omeka S: First Observations