Omeka

We’ve written two plugins for administrators who want to make data entry easier and more reliable. With the Simple Vocab plugin you can define a controlled vocabulary for any field using a simple interface. It even helps you build vocabularies using texts that already exist in your archive. The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) plugin adds an autocomplete feature to your Dublin Core’s Subject element, pulling results from Library of Congress’ considerable database of subject headings. Happy data entry!

Simple Vocab
Library of Congress Subject Headings

The American Library Association’s (ALA’s) Program on America’s Libraries for the 21^st Century has recognized Digital Amherst with one of three awards for best use of cutting-edge technology. A project of the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts, Digital Amherst is a collaborative Omeka-powered website celebrating the town’s 250^th anniversary. The official announcement [.pdf] quotes Lead Technical Developer Kirstin Kay saying, “using Omeka software as the backbone of our digital library allowed us to focus our limited resources (both labor and money) on high impact areas. The very easy administrative and cataloging areas were simple to learn and allowed us to quickly get items ‘live’. Pre-made design themes gave us a jumping-off point to really customize the public interface to showcase our collection.”

Congratulations, Digital Amherst!

We are pleased to find that Omeka will be incorporated into some of the newly-announced National Leadership Grant projects funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. We look forward to the contributions those projects will make to Omeka’s development and to the community of users. Congratulations, everyone.

As the Omeka development continues, our team is very interested in knowing the approximate size of your Omeka archive. This information will help us improve and optimize the software for sites of all sizes.

Please take a second to participate in our poll.

And, if you have another minute, please tell us about your project development in the Forums, Use Cases section: http://omeka.org/forums/forum/use-cases.

Thanks and enjoy the long weekend!

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.