preliminary questions

Hello,

I am beginning to look into Omeka for my institution to be used for user-generated transcription and metadata. In glancing over the documentation, I got the impression that the Dublin Core fields can be opened up to be editable by the public. I can't seem to figure out how this works though. Can someone point me to the correct documentation for this?

Also, assuming there have been a sizable number of items transcribed or have had metadata provided by the public, how easy is it to extract all of this at once to be added to the official metadata record/catalog? Is it a matter of running a query in the database or does it have to be done item by item through the web interface?

For people who have successfully used Omeka as part of a crowdsourcing project, does anyone have workflow documentation that you would be willing to share? I am interested in knowing how much staff time is actually required to keep this sort of thing going. Thank you for your help.

Aaron Cusick

Hi Aaron,

As Omeka currently works, it isn't quite possible to open up all of the metadata fields for crowdsourcing. There is a transcription plugin (Scripto -- http://omeka.org/add-ons/plugins/scripto/ ), but that is meant to facilitate the transcription of the files attached to an item. There is brief documentation for Scripto in the documentation here, but there is more extensive documentation on Scripto's own site: http://scripto.org/.

Good luck!
Sharon

As for extracting the data, Omeka 2.1 includes an API for reading and writing data, so a middle layer could be built to grab data from Omeka and add it to the official catalog, assuming that is possible on the official catalog's end.

Depending on what Omeka plugins you use, those might need to be updated to also use the API