Collecting Site Case Study

Hurricane Digital Memory Bank | Collecting Site

Introduction

A collecting site can be built very quickly, because you are asking for others to contribute the content. The hardest part is tailoring the questions on the form to suit the needs of your project.

Look at the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank while reading through the site breakdown.

Site Breakdown

  • Theme: HDMB-specific theme. One of the packaged seasonal themes might work well.
  • Plugins: Contribution, Geolocation, Simple Pages, Dropbox (for uploading large files in the admin side)
  • Major Sections and pages
    • Homepage:
      • Featured items: You can feature any item from the admin/items screen.
      • "Add Your Photos" and "Add Your Story" buttons linked to the /contribution page and are hard coded into the index.php page. We did this to make adding very easy and obvious for someone coming to the site.
    • Add to the Memory Bank: links to the /contribution page which brings up the form.
      • You may modify the standard form packaged in Contribution plugin (See: Contribution plugin instructions)
        • In HDMB, individuals may map their contributions. This is difficult to do out of the box, but for your site, you can create a field in the form that says "location" and then you could map those locations from the admin side. (See: Geolocation plugin instructions.)
      • Contributions will be added to the archive as un-public items. It is up to you to review the items and make them public for viewing on the public site. Remember: if you are logged into the admin side and then you check the public side, you will be able to see everything in the archive, public and not public. So, to check for an accurate public view, be sure to log out from the admin.
    • Browse: This section is the /items/browse section created automatically for you in Omeka. If you would like to browse by item type, you can add in links that will browse different item types, such as:

<a href=“http://yoursite.org/items/browse/?type=6&#8221;> Images </a>

    • Collections: This section is simply the /collections/browse section automatically generated in your installation.
    • About: This can be made with the Simple Pages plugin.
    • FAQs: This can be made with the Simple Pages plugin
    • News—if you want a blog, you can install a WordPress blog in a directory w/in the Omeka installation and had to make it work within the Omeka theme. This is a bit more advanced!
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