We are excited to announce two new Omeka plugins that were developed by the folks at the University of Virginia’s Scholar’s Lab. Ethan Gruber took the lead and since he knows much more about the EAD Importer and VRA Core plugins than we do, we asked him if we could cross-post his Scholar’s Lab blog entry, Expanding the Capabilities of Omeka here. Ethan is a web application developer for Digital Research and Scholarship, a division of the University of Virginia Library.

Note: Plugins available for check out through SVN for now, but will be available to download as zip files through the plugin directory in the near future.

Because I have a keen interest in the description of cultural heritage artifacts and in doing interesting things with metadata, in recent months I have developed a handful of Omeka plugins to meet these interests. My first foray into plugin development for the application was with the EAD Importer. The EAD Importer, as the name suggests, extracts item-level metadata (along with a bit of collection-level metadata, like rights) from Encoded Archival Description finding aids and generates a CSV file which can be imported through the CSV Import plugin developed by the Omeka crew. The plugin would be useful to archivists who would like to use Omeka to build online exhibits of their collections. I took this framework a step further to create a plugin that is capable of importing any flat XML into Omeka by transforming that file into a CSV file.

Most recently, I have turned my attention to expanding the descriptive abilities of Omeka into the realm of collections of artwork. Omeka items are described with Dublin Core, which is capable of describing anything, though not particularly well. I developed VraCoreElementSet, which incorporates VRA Core fields into the Edit Item form. VRA Core is a much more semantically appropriate schema for describing art and artifacts. Since it was conceived as an XML standard (not strictly a flat list of fields), some elements have hierarchical sub-componenets. For example, a work may have several agents involved in its production, and each agent has a name as well as a role, culture, birth date, and, as the case may be, a death date. The VraCoreElementSet plugin creates a table for agents so that a user may enter this data separately. Then in the Edit Item form, the user may select VRA Core agents from a drop down menu restricted by the records in the agents table. Records may also be exported to schema-compliant VRA Core XML. There is still some work remaining on this plugin, but it is well on its way toward completion.

Now that the Scholars’ Lab has contributed EAD Importer and VRA Core Element Set plugins, Omeka may attract new institutional users from the library, archive, and museum fields, who may have otherwise settled for proprietary applications to disseminate their digital collections.

We are trying something new this year and launching our first Omeka Plugin Rush. The Omeka Team needs help building plugins, so we decided to turn to our Omeka developer community for some assistance. Will you help us?

What, you might ask, will developers get in return for this work? In addition to the public praise the Omeka team will heap upon you, we will send along a mystery box of SWAG and a cash prize–each plugin pays a different amount depending on difficulty.

While we appreciate your ideas for plugins, we have a few in mind for the Rush. By May 1, 2010, we want working code for the following plugins:

• Flickr importer–grab images, metadata and imports into Omeka.($250)
• User tagging–allow anonymous users to tag items on public site. ($100)
• Autocomplete for metadata–make data entry easier by suggesting previously used terms for each field with a dropdown box.($100)
• Timeline Widget– allow users to add a SIMILE Timeline widget to their theme.($100)
• Feed Importer ($250)–import data from Atom and RSS feeds.
• Flash Wrapper ($100)–displays movie files with an embedded flash video player widget.

If you are interested in “rushing”, please do the following:

• Check out the specs for each plugin.
• Email our dev team(will at omeka dot org) stating which plugin you want to build and include a quick proposal or outline for approaching the code (Only one plugin per person or team).
• Wait for dev team response. They will review proposals, make suggestions, and contact applicants to assign plugins. Once a plugin is assigned, it will come off of the list.

This Plugin Rush will be managed and updated on the dev list, and then we will announce the developers on the blog once the code is available for download in the Omeka plugin directory.

This is a great opportunity to test your skills, help an open-source community, and get a box of random things from the Omeka Team.

Tell your friends!

Are you going to the National Council on Public History meeting in Providence, RI? If you are interested in learning more about how Omeka can help with your public history projects, we are holding an informal workshop (aka “playdate”), on Thursday, April 2.

Visit the Omeka wiki to learn more and sign up for the NCPH workshop. Not going to NCPH? Look at the list of upcoming conference presentations–Omeka may be coming to your town soon.

We have scheduled 2 “playdates” for 20 interested users to come to CHNM and work with the Omeka team. In one room, 10 developers will work with the dev team to build plugins, hack themes, or add to the documentation. In the other room, 10 end users/content creators, will learn how to manage an Omeka archive and build exhibits.

If you’re interested, read the details and sign up on the Codex Wiki:

• February 20, 2009
• June 26, 2009.

We will also start posting dates of conference workshops/presentations in a new section of the Codex, Upcoming Workshops.

Stop in and see us sometime.

The Omeka development team is scheduling weekly developer chats on IRC. Our first chat was this afternoon at 2:30EST, and we had a good showing of both the core dev team along with users and coders from a variety of institutions including libraries and universities. For Q&A about hacking themes and plugins, and to talk more generally about developing with Omeka, join us on IRC at irc.freenode.net #omeka

Our next scheduled chat will be at 2:30EST on Friday, January 16th. I’ll talk to you then!