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.

Omeka has a document viewer plugin once again! Some of you may remember our iPaper viewer that worked with version 0.9. After a few upgrades in our system and some changes in iPaper’s API, we decided to build a new plugin.

DocsViewer embeds a Google document viewer into item/show pages in both the public and administrative interfaces. The viewer reads PDF documents, PowerPoint presentations, TIFF files, and most Microsoft Word documents.

In addition to DocsViewer, we are also releasing a Page Caching plugin that will improve the load time of an Omeka site by offering different types of caching that is configurable in the plugin settings.

Try these plugins and let us know what you think.

I’m pleased to announce the release of a frequently requested plugin, the Creative Commons Chooser. This plugin was created by a member of our open source community, Mohit Gupta.

Creative Commons Chooser allows site administrators to associate Creative Commons licenses with individual Omeka items by providing a Commons License Chooser in the admin interface. Items in your Omeka archive can be licensed individually, and a single license can be applied as a default setting for new items added to your archive.

Mohit is currently a graduate student at the UC Berkeley School of Information studying the role of information systems in preservation of cultural histories and in evolving interactions with urban spaces. If you’re like Mohit and developing your own plugins or themes, drop us a line on the developer mailing list and we can set you up with access to our addons repository to release the code.

The latest release of the Creative Commons Chooser plugin can be downloaded from our new and improved Add Ons Directory!

We are happy to release ExhibitBuilder plugin version 0.5. Here are the major changes for 0.5:

• Adds pagination for exhibits in the admin.
• Gives Contributor users the ability to add/edit their own Exhibits, adds a function to check user permissions for a specific exhibit.
• Fixes the problem of displaying special characters in exhibit layouts.
• Fixes CSS bug where the breadcrumb would hide parts of the exhibit admin forms.

Developers will be interested in these more technical changes:

• Adds an exhibit builder dropdown navigation helper function called exhibit_builder_select_exhibit.
• Adds an option to the exhibit_builder_page_nav that allows the pages to be displayed by the page title or the page order number.

Please test the plugin and give us feedback on the Omeka Forums or Omeka Developer List.

Today, the Omeka team is releasing the first beta of a new plugin: Reports. Reports lets you create a formatted report from a set of selected Omeka items. You can save information about thousands of items at once, and if you add new items, they’re automatically included in future reports.

The most exciting feature is that Reports let you create a PDF with printable QR Codes for your Omeka items. Mobile phone users can scan the code and will be sent directly to your site where they can learn more about an object on display in an exhibit.

The plugin also supports HTML output, and it can be extended to create a report in almost any format.

Download the 1.0 beta and try it out. Remember, this is a beta release, so it’s not quite ready for use with production sites.

Have a problem to report or a suggestion to make? Please, leave us feedback on the Forums.