Example Omeka Sites
Last week you began learning how to add items into Omeka, a software tool that you can use to create online exhibits and collections of images, documents, multimedia, etc. The best way to understand Omeka is to look at some finished products. Take a few minutes to explore one of the following sites:
- If your last name begins with A-F: https://www.cppdigitallibrary.org/
- If your last name begins with G-Z: http://mallhistory.org/
I will then put you into breakout rooms. Use your screen share function to walk your partner through the site you examined. What is its thematic topic, what is its audience, what kind of “stuff” do they have, how is it organized, what are some strengths or weaknesses, etc.?
Debrief as a class:
- What seems to be the “structure” of an Omeka site? What are its different elements?
Shared Omeka Installation
For the purposes of this week, we will all be working in the same Omeka installation hosted by Professor Blevins rather than on your own individual installation through your Reclaim Hosting server. You should have received an email at your ucdenver.edu email adding you as a new user. You need to activate your user account by clicking the link in the email and then creating a new password that I sent to you over the Slack #general channel. Please copy your username - it should be the first letter of your first name followed by your last name (ex. cblevins). To access the login page for our shared site, go to: http://cameronblevins.org/teaching/sp21-dig-stud/sandbox/omeka/admin/. This is where you type in the username and password if you get logged out.
Items and Metadata
If you remember back to last week, the building blocks of Omeka are items. These are individual sources or other kinds of material - in a museum context, something like a painting, map, diary, film, etc. The point of Omeka is add these items as digital records and document their metadata, or information about them. Take a minute to navigate to Item Types in your Omeka dashboard. These are the general categories of items that Omeka has supplied for you, along with customized metadata fields tailored for that kind of item. However, if you want to you can make your own item types and add your own metadata fields. Omeka also uses Dublin Core, which is a set of metadata standards for digital collections.
Today you are going to add at least two items into our shared site. We’re using the Library of Congress’s Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs, focusing on the decade 1860-1870. The idea is that, as a group, we will create roughly 20 random items from this collection to give us a shared body of historical material by the end of class. Go to these search results then navigate to the page of results that I have assigned to each of you:
- Bianca
- Scott
- Teresa
- Jaclyn
- Ryan Thomas
- Keira Maxwell
- Whitney
- TJ
- Yuning
Scroll through the images on your page and then choose two that you are going to add into our shared Omeka installation. You are then going to use these general instructions on adding Items taken from another tutorial written by Sarah Pugachev and try to apply them to your two items. I have intentionally chosen a different LOC collection from the one Pugachev used so that you need to think more actively about how to apply their instructions. Once you’ve created your item, you can click on the item and then View Public Page to see what it looks like to a visitor to your site.
If you’ve finished adding your two items, help your classmates who might be having trouble or navigate to the Items in our Omeka site and check out what they have already added.
Notify Professor Blevins once you have finished with this section.
Collections and Exhibits
Collections
You can group items together in collections - much like a museum might have a particular collection of, say, material gifted by a particular donor. Omeka defines collections as: “In Omeka Classic, an item can only belong to one collection. Collections can, of course, have multiple items. The concept of Omeka collections originates from museum and archives collections; one cannot put a document into more than one box.” - Omeka Collections. Collections allow users to go back and browse through all the items in a collection. We are going to hold off on creating a collection with our site for now.
Exhibits
Museums typically don’t display the entirety of their collections or items - they curate them into exhibits for visitors to walk through. Although Omeka allows users to browse collections, it has a different feature for making digital exhibits. To do so, however, you’ll need to install a plugin called Exhibit Builder under the Plugins tab at the top of your Dashboard (I’ve already done this for our site). This adds a new option on the left of your Dashboard called Exhibits.
You are now able to build an exhibit within your Omeka site. Once again, try to follow the section of Pugachev’s tutorial on Exhibits but apply it to our class’s installation so that it includes items you and your classmates added to your Omeka site along with some text to contextualize them. For the purposes of this exercise, please use your username (ex. cblevins) for both the Title and Slug metadata so that we can keep them straight. I’ve found the best way to understand exhibits is to try building them and then muck around with some of the options. See what the public-facing exhibit looks like by clicking View Public Page.
Notes on Omeka
Types of Omeka:
- Omeka Classic: This is what we are going to use. It allows you to run an independent website on your own server (in our case, on Reclaim Hosting). This makes sense for smaller-scale projects or more individual work.
- Omeka.net: This is more limited in functionality, but you can quickly build an Omeka website hosted for free on the Omeka.net servers.
- Omeka S: the newest version of Omeka Classic geared towards larger institutions like archives, universities, galleries, etc. Its main difference from Omeka Classic is that it makes it easier for many different users to collaborate using a shared collection of items, media, and metadata.
Appearance: If you would like to change the appearance of your site (colors, design, etc.) you can do so by switching Themes (similar to Wordpress). It’s a little bit trickier, however. In this case, you need to download an Omeka Theme from this list and use the following instructions to upload it to your Omeka directory through Reclaim Hosting: https://community.reclaimhosting.com/t/uploading-plugins-to-omeka/195/2.
Vocabulary: if you get confused about the different parts of Omeka, you can refer to Miriam Posner’s section on Omeka Vocabulary: http://miriamposner.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Up-and-Running-with-Omeka2.pdf