Since 2009, any Omeka website may make their data available by activating the OAI-PMH Repository plugin and may harvest OAI-PMH data sets with the OAI-PMH Harvester. Now, the OAI-PMH Harvester plugin is available with every Omeka.net site. Are you sharing and harvesting?

Some online repositories expose their metadata through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), an “initiative to develop and promote interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.”

We here at CHNM developed Omeka with interoperability as a key feature from its early stages. We also envisioned that Omeka would facilitate the sharing of digital collections and archives across institutions and individuals. For example, a regional cultural consortium could highlight collections in an Omeka site featuring digital objects from local museums, galleries, and libraries focused on on thematic topics or for the purpose of celebrating a local anniversary or special event.

Never tried this sharing thing? All you need to do is to install the OAI-PMH Repository to expose data, and tell someone–either through our list of harvestable Omeka sites, or with the OAI community. The plugin reads an Omeka collection as a set. If you have no collections, your entire archive may be exposed.

If you’re interested in testing out the OAI-PMH Harvester plugin, try these examples of harvestable sets. (Don’t worry, you may delete the harvest when you’re done testing.):

• Library of Congress OAI-PMH sets (no files, but contain many sets of item metadata): http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0
• Bibliothèque Numérique – Université Rennes 2, University Libraryhttp://bibnum.univ-rennes2.fr/oai-pmh-repository/request?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc
• Bracero History Archive: http://braceroarchive.org/oai-pmh-repository/request

The page of harvestable sets is small and we would like to see it grow. Sign into the wiki, add your base URL, and let the Omeka community know if you are exposing your data. Thanks for sharing!

The team is happy to announce updates for more plugins that work with Omeka versions 1.3+.

• The Dropbox provides users with an easy way to batch upload files by creating items directly from files or by associating files with individual items. The newest version, 0.5, offers better direction to users if there are permission errors in the Dropbox directory.
• Image Annotation 1.0 provides a way for users to select an area of an image and attach notes. Those notes are accessible on the public items/show page. We should note that you may need to tweak your theme to accommodate the annotated images particularly if other plugins with public views, such as geolocation, are activated on individual item pages.
• The Contribution plugin, which allows web visitors to contribute stories, images, and other items to your Omeka site, is now configurable through the admin interface in version 2.1. Unlike earlier versions that required users to edit files in the plugin’s directory, now users may select the types of items to be contributed and tailor questions for their users in the plugin’s dashboard.
• The Geolocation plugin 1.2, that allows users to locate items on a Google map, now contains additional configurations in the plugin panel, including the option for adding a link to browsing the map in the tems/browse navigation.
• Lastly, the Zotero Import plugin, version 1.2, fixes some bugs users experienced when importing data from Zotero libraries.

Check them out, and let us know what you think!

The Simple Vocab plugin is now compatible with the newest version of Omeka. Just download the new version (1.3-1.1), replace the SimpleVocab plugin directory, and click the “Upgrade” button in the plugins settings page. Everything should work as expected.

If you haven’t tried this plugin, we recommend it to those who want strict control over data entry. Just select an element and define your vocabulary terms. Its as simple as that!

We’re happy to introduce a plugin that imports Zotero data into Omeka. Zotero is a popular tool that helps you collect, manage, cite, and share your research sources. With this plugin you can move your research into Omeka, making it possible to further organize and exhibit your Zotero library. Just sync your library to the Zotero server, tell the Zotero Import plugin what library you want to import, and it’ll pull in source items, notes, files, and web snapshots. Read the documentation and get the plugin here.

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.