Can our project use Omeka?

Hoping someone could provide some guidance.

We are a not-for-profit trying to provide a 'portal' for researchers that will link to various museums and archives with material related to our group.

We currently have a filemaker database with two tables. Photographers and Institutions. Each photographer page lists all the institutions holding prints by that individual. Similarly, each institution page lists all the photographers from our group represented in their collection. The system is pretty bare-bones, but it's relational, and it works, but is too limited.

So, can we use Omeka to make identities for Photographers and Institutions, so that if we find--lets say--a Finding Aid from the Library of Congress that includes photographs by Ansel Adams, could we add that URL to the site and select from a dropdown field the Photographer and Institution to which it refers. In doing so, the Photographer's page and the Institution's page would be populated with this new resource?

Is this possible with Omeka? (We also want to be able to upload and provide access to other types of documents and files related to Photographers, and would want to be able to connect those items to the photographer's page.)

I played around a bit in the Sandbox but how to do this was not intuitive.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ryan

If I'm following right, it _could_ be done, but might take some customization of plugins, particularly Item Relations, to make something like the dropdown you imagine. You'd probably create different item types for Photographer and Institution, then relate them to the finding aid info you enter.

So, doable, I think, but with some custom coding involved.

You might also look into whether Drupal can accomplish this -- from what you describe, it sounds a bit more like a Drupal site using related content types.

Hope that helps