History Log

By UC Santa Cruz University Library and Daniel Berthereau Creates a log of basic curatorial events for each item, collection and file, including ingress, updates, and pushes, and compute statistics on evolution.
Download 2.10

History Log (plugin for Omeka)

History Log is an Omeka plugin that logs creation, updates, deletion, import and export of Omeka items, collection and files and allows administrators to recall this information later.

This is not a replacement for your regular backups of the database, even if each each change is logged and each record can potentially be partially recovered at any time, except files. An undo button allows to recover the deletion of a record.

The logs are used by the plugin Curator Monitor, that computes statistics and allows to follow selected fields with limited vocabularies, for instance a special element "Metadata Status" with values "Incomplete", "Complete", "Fact Checked", "Ready to Publish" and "Published".

Notes

  • Logging

  • If the plugin has not been installed with Omeka, older records will not have log entries and their stats will be partial.

  • Logging is done via standard hooks. If a plugin bypasses the standard methods, some logs may be missing.
  • Some standard methods don't use hooks, for example deleteElementTextsByElementId(). They should not be used internally. Omeka uses them, but fires hooks anyway.

  • Recovering of a deleted record

  • Records are recreated with the same id.

  • It's recommended to undelete collections before their items.
  • Files can't be recovered, but their metadata are logged, so they can be manually recreated as long as files are backuped.
  • Non standard metadata are not saved and can't be recreated: status public or featured, item type, tags, flag "html" of element texts, etc. For the owner, the user who deleted the record is used.
  • Check Omeka logs after a successful rebuild to see possible issues.

  • Export of logs

Logs can be filtered and exported via the main page of the plugin. Supported formats are:

  • CSV, with values separated by a tabulation.
  • OpenDocument Spreadsheet or "ods", the normalized format for spreadsheets, that can be open by any free spreadsheets like LibreOffice, or not free ones. This format requires that Zip to be installed on the server (generally by default).
  • Flat OpenDocument Spreadsheet or "fods", another standard format that can be opened by any free spreadsheets or by any text editor (this is a simple xml file). Note: With old releases of LibreOffice for Windows, a little free filter may need to be installed.

If you use this plugin, please take a moment to submit feedback about your experience, so we can keep making Omeka better: see User Survey.

Installation

Uncompress files and rename plugin folder "HistoryLog".

Then install it like any other Omeka plugin.

Warning

Use it at your own risk.

It's always recommended to backup your files and database regularly so you can roll back if needed.

Troubleshooting

See online issues on the plugin issues page on GitHub.

License

This plugin is published under GNU/GPL v3.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

Copyright

  • Copyright 2014-2015 UCSC Library Digital Initiatives
  • Copyright Daniel Berthereau, 2015 (see Daniel-KM on GitHub)
Version Released Minimum Omeka version
2.10November 28, 2017 [info]2.1