Omeka

We’ve just fixed a couple of critical bugs in the Geolocation plugin, so anyone who is currently using it will need to update to the latest version. It’s as simple as downloading the new plugin and unzipping it into your plugins/ directory in Omeka.

We have returned from a very productive meeting organized by our great partners at the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) in St. Paul. We worked, listened, and discussed Omeka 0.9.0 with folks from MHS, along with others from the Great Rivers Network, University of Minnesota libraries, Science Museum of Minnesota, Carleton College library, Northfield Historical Society and Public Library, Stillwater Public Library, and Hennepin County Medical Center History Museum.

Our goals for this meeting were threefold:

1. To introduce Omeka and projects built upon its base.

2. To demonstrate how Omeka works by building and shaping an archive and then pulling items together for a mock curated exhibit.

3. To discuss concerns and listen to feedback on Omeka’s user interface, overall functionality, and potential new features.

Our working group was incredibly lively and talkative, which pleased us. We took copious notes and are sharing them with the entire Omeka team.

While Omeka is flexible for many projects, we are particularly concerned with meeting the needs of smaller museums and libraries who have fascinating collections to share, but lack an inexpensive and easy way to publish them online. One workshop participant volunteers at the Stillwater Public Library and works with their special collections. She wants to digitize many of their documents and publish them in a system that is fully searchable and easy to access, because she knows that many researchers do not know the breadth of their collections. She liked using Omeka and hopes that it can provide the library with an affordable solution for accomplishing their goals.

Other participants came to the meeting with collaboration in mind. A group of libraries and museums from Northfield, MN envisions using Omeka to aggregate data stored in different collections and content management systems. Omeka not only offers this group a database for publishing their resources online, but will eventually provide plugins to make batch importing of records from different CMS’s into installations possible and easy.

The most recent report from IMLS found that adults trust museum and library websites more than other sources of information, including government sites. So, why not publish more content? We think Omeka can expand the amount of content available in the current museum- and library-sphere, and can increase the presence of medium and smaller museums and libraries who want to share their expertise and collections with eager online audiences.

In our ongoing effort to make Omeka a better tool to access your documents online, we are proud to announce the release of the iPaper and PdfMeNot plugins.

Developed by the document sharing company Scribd, iPaper is a “document format built for the Internet.” With Omeka’s iPaper plugin you’ll be able to automatically convert your documents to the iPaper format and embed them into your website. All you need is to register for a free Scribd Platform API account, install and configure the Omeka iPaper plugin, and your documents will be available for browsing and searching directly in your web browser. Supported documents include Portable Document Format (pdf), Microsoft Word (doc), PowerPoint (ppt), and most OpenDocument formats.

Developed by the web startup workshop Stateless Systems, PdfMeNot is another free service that converts your documents to a format that is viewable within in your web browser. With Omeka’s PdfMeNot plugin you’ll be able to automatically convert your .pdf files and embed them directly into your website. PdfMeNot only supports Portable Document Format (pdf).

Both plugins are fully configurable and easy to use. The iPaper and PdfMeNot document viewers will be available on the administrative item show pages by default. If you wish to embed them in your public theme, see these directions. Have fun with the plugins and tell us what you think.

Download the iPaper plugin
Download the PdfMeNot plugin

The Omeka team should be encouraged. At three weeks since we released the public beta, we’re had over 500 downloads and had a flurry of interest at conferences including WebWise & code4lib. We’re in a good position to continue building an active developer community that augments Omeka’s core. Here are three exciting examples:

1) Omeka forum user Kerim recently posted on the forums about his idea to use the iPaper document viewer for displaying pdf and doc files in a slick flash-based interface. After experiencing some problems, he asked for help and Omeka crack programmer Jim Safley went to work on a soon-to-be-released iPaper plugin. I know there has been some buzz about iPaper recently, so it’s great to see this feature being added to Omeka’s growing plugin directory.

2) One of the hardest parts of getting an open source project off the ground is helping support early adopters, and despite the high level of traffic the forums have been receiving we’ve been able to keep up-to-date with most questions, thanks to the hard work of the Omeka team and the community itself! This is one of the most-promising signs of the project, that users unaffiliated with CHNM are going out of their way to help others with their installations. Special thanks to MrDys and Syma!

3) Wally Grotophorst at the GMU library has been exploring ways of harvesting data from their MARS (Dspace) repository and pulling that metadata into Omeka. According to Wally, “once an Omeka database of items was built using the DSpace metadata, non-technical staff could log into Omeka and build exhibits.” And Wally isn’t the only one interested in this; others I met at code4lib made strong cases for Omeka’s use in very similar situations. With some terrific ideas for how this could be done, this is the start of a conversation that will mature in the future.

As our community of Omekans continues to grow you can enter these ongoing conversations by posting on the forums. We’ve created categories for different topics, including plugins and a space to discuss data migration. I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in migrating data to Omeka to post their ideas and works-in-progress there. For updates on what’s going on with Omeka, I’ll continue to post on the official Omeka blog as well as my own blog. If you’re on twitter, you can follow Omeka or myself. Tom and Sharon are both tweeting away as well!

[Cross-posted on Finding America]

I’m just returning from the Institute for Museum and Library Service’s WebWise conference in Miami, where I spent the last two days talking about Omeka with librarians, museum professionals and digital humanists who are on the cutting edge of using Web 2.0 technologies to share their materials with the public. The theme of this year’s conference was “The Power of Community” and there were a number of exciting talks and presentations that pointed to the future of digital outreach for cultural institutions. I got to speak with many, many committed people who were passionate about sharing their work and their collections. These conversations convinced me that Omeka will be an important tool in this digital work.

First, these users are looking for flexibility both in design and operation. Omeka has the capacity to produce unique looking sites that mesh with an institution’s existing digital presence. Also, Omeka’s archival system uses core metadata and item types, which makes it easily adaptable to the very different and specific needs of institutions from those that deal with great works of art to those that deal with ancient artifacts.

Second, cultural institutions have fascinating holdings, and their curators, archivists, librarians and resident scholars have a world of knowledge about those holdings that they need to communicate to the public. Omeka can facilitate this communication. Omeka was popular with the crowd at WebWise because it allows content experts to publish exhibits that combine rich layers of narrative interpretation with items that are accompanied by full metadata records.

Third, users need something inexpensive and easy to use, preferably open source. For cultural institutions with limited resources and budgets, this is one of Omeka’s real bonuses. Without making a huge investment in a thickly articulated content management system or a publishing mechanism that wraps content in Flash, institutions can use Omeka to increase their digital presence, quickly and easily, without hiring expensive designers or extra programming help. Additionally, Omeka exhibits will allow many of the important departments of museums and libraries to work together to produce narrative exhibits, with teaching components, and Web 2.0 features that encourage the public to return to sites again and again.

So, with those key points in mind, I’m happy to welcome all of our new WebWise friends who will be experimenting with Omeka as a web publication tool for their museum, library, or cultural institution. Please stay in touch and feel free to post to the forums as you use Omeka. We want to hear how things are going and to see the wonderful exhibits that you build.