Well, not quite worldwide, but I had the pleasure of sharing Omeka with the attendees at the annual Museum Computing Network of Taiwan meeting in Taipei last week.  It was a vibrant gathering of museum professionals from across the country, each working in their own way to increase the visibility and standardization of cultural heritage institutions in Taiwan.  I look forward to seeing these colleagues again when they visit for the MCN meeting in Portland in the fall.  The Omeka team is really interested in international collaboration, so share your ideas on facilitating these connections in the comments.

Below, I’ve included my talk with my slides.

The Omeka dropbox plugin has been released for the latest version of Omeka, 0.10. It allows Omeka users to ‘batch upload’ a large quantity of files at one time, and creates unique items in the archive for each file. Additionally, it allows you to associate numerous files with pre-existing items in edit mode.

I encourage you to give it a try. Download the latest version of Dropbox, and check out other plugins in on our plugins add-ons page.

The stable version of Omeka 0.10 has been out for over a month and you may have noticed some major changes to the interface. Among the most important of these changes is the inclusion of “element sets.” This post will explain what element sets are and how you can use them to get the most out of Omeka.

But before I do that, let me explain what an “element” is. In previous versions of Omeka, elements were called “metafields.” We decided to change this name to better reflect the common usage of the term. Essentially, an element is a name that represents a particular attribute of an item. For example, “name,” “date,” and “language” are elements, while “Magna Carta,” “1215,” and “latin” are their attributes, or, as we call them, “element texts.”

It’s best to think of an element set as a set of related elements that are available to all items, regardless of item type. For example, we’ve included the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set in all new Omeka installations. Dublin Core is an internationally recognized standard for describing any conceivable resource. This element set comprises 15 elements, including “title,” “description,” “date,” and “format.” While it is not required, we strongly recommend that you mark up all your items using the Dublin Core element set because doing so will standardize your repository’s metadata and facilitate interoperability.

Whereas Dublin Core is a generic set of elements used to describe any item, there can be other, more domain-specific element sets. For example, art museums may consider adding a CDWA Lite element set, which contains elements that describe core records for works of art and material culture. Libraries may consider adding a METS element set, which contains elements for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata regarding objects within a digital library. And archives may consider adding an EAD element set, which contains elements for describing the content and intellectual organization of collections of archival materials.

We’ll be working to release some element set plugins in the near future, including one using CDWA Lite and one that includes Dublin Core refinements. Please take a look at the metadata standards used in your discipline and send us ideas on what element sets to include.

Exhibit Builder 0.3.2 is a recommended upgrade for anyone currently using the Exhibit Builder with Omeka 0.10. This release fixes a major bug that prevented users from adding and updating text on an exhibit page. You can get version 0.3.2 now on the plugins page, and you can find instructions for upgrading plugins in our Documentation.

Those of us at CHNM would like to send a big thanks to our user and developer communities for all you have done to make Omeka an early success, and we’re pleased to announce that your contributions and enthusiasm have been recognized by a blue-ribbon commission of leading technologists with a $50,000 Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration. In further recognition of the importance of community to the continued success of Omeka, prize money from the award will be allocated toward endowing year around user support for the project.

Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC) awards recognize not-for-profit organizations that are making substantial contributions of their own resources toward the development of open source software and the fostering of collaborative communities to sustain open source development. Members of the prize committee included Vinton Cerf, often called the “father of the internet” and chief internet evangelist at Google; Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web; John Gage, chief researcher and director of the Science Office at Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation; Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media; John Seely Brown, former chief scientist at Xerox Corp.; Ira Fuchs, vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and Donald J. Waters, program officer in the Program in Scholarly Communication at the Mellon Foundation. Committee members singled out Omeka for “involving an international collaborative community from the very beginning of the project.”

A special thanks to our friend Wally Grotophorst, who helpfully captured the full audio of Vint Cerf’s presentation of the award at the annual CNI Task Force Meeting in Washington, D.C.