GMU Product to Build Online Exhibits

Hour 1 notes:

INTRO TO OMEKA: --GMU product to build online exhibits --planning is key! Anna K's org (Boston) created a 'best practices' for using Omeka --handout link --> reach out to the community via the forum

Today: we'll use a repository, and create accounts to use the feature-limited .net version of Omeka. Then we'll build something!

After you're logged in, view your Dashboard steps: 1) create a domain name via "Add a Site" 2) storage plans can be free or paid for, depending on the scale you need 3) in "manage your sites" you'll see everything you own: items, collections, tags, plugins, theme, exhibits. What are these? items - like an item in your catalog record collections - lump together varied items tags - just like any other social media 'folksonomy'. you can use LC subject headings and standard terms exhibits - once you have collections, you can provide a narrative, explanatory essays, images, etc to build out a final published product. question: can you have an 'item' without a digital file

###plugins: you'll need to enable them first, and that installs them. The documentation will tell you what each plugin does.

Some plugins that are useful... -Simple Pages - can write in plain text, or in HTML if you are comfy with that -CSV import - your Dublin Core metadata can be imported -OAI-PMH harvester - ? -LC Suggest - authorities and vocabularies (id.loc.gov) -Docs Viewer - embed docs from Google Docs or PDF. -Exhibit Builder - if you are at the point of building an exhibit -GoogleAnalytics if you don't want/like/need a plugin, just deactivate it or uninstall.

You can also collaborate, by adding users to your site! Plans to have storage are listed on the Omeka site (free, paid 1 GB and up, also custom plans)

###Appearance and Themes Comes with a WYSIWYG editor Caution: if you are writing HTML in the source editor window, there are some elements that are not going to render, so the source editor will pop up an error. checkbox to check = advanced site-wide search ("solar searching"). Definitely do this because your entire exhibit/site will be searchable. featured exhibit - optional, kind of like having a featured "sticky" post in Wordpress or another blogging platform.

*Navigation* - you can make a custom URL suffix for portions of your site/exhibit.

Easy to customize your nav

Anna's pet peeve - no autosave!! you need to constantly click 'save changes'

###Users various levels of authorization ("roles"): 'super' 'admin' 'researcher' 'contributor' you'll send a potential user an email, and they be assigned a role.

Question: how similar/different is this to Wordpress?

A: framework-wise, there's a bunch that's similar (PHP, CSS codebase). On the server side, very different. Zend Framework.

Under "settings" you can do some further building of your site - add site title, copyright information, author information, tag delimiter. remember to "save"! Further changes can be made to how the user viewing your site/exhibit gets to your stuff. They can be restricted to only searching for Collections, for example. Better to refine search ability down to item level? Element Sets - you can arrange Dublin Core elements (or your other metadata schema) in certain ways. You're not able to delete elements, but you're able to choose to hide the elements from public view.

Uses Dublin Core, but you can customize. Also suggests LoC subject headings

More themes and plugins at GitHub - for Omeka.org version

Hour 2 notes:

When adding items and their metadata, there should be a set of best- practices/guidelines. Some Omeka sites have these posted “Coverage” info: locations, etc. for temporal/Geospatial/visualization - use this! Default setting is private Files - to be associated with an ITEM/record. This is where you add the image or other media Tags - add to individual records OR edit in sidebar “Tags” Batch/bulk editing from Items Dashboard

Importing metadata:

For hotlinks in the metadata: click the HTML box for the WYSIWYG tools. Can also use html tags in spreadsheets OAI - probably won’t display as a hotlink - users can copy & paste URL OR you can go in and edit each item. Messy data? Export to .csv then to OpenRefine to clean up OR clean up before importing To pull metadata from a site: copy the URL up to the ? in the address OR you can look at the XML tree and use the “metadataPrefix” address Paste the address in the OAI-PMH Harvester. Continue refreshing the page to check the status until “COMPLETE” Go to ITEMS in sidebar - the items should be listed.

Use htlm5 plugin for audio/video in omeka.org OR omeka.net paid version To find these, look at Library of Congress OAI-PMH samples; Harvard; and OpenArchives.org Entities in Europe are pushing for the use and supply of open metadata