New Project: POYi Online Archive and Exhibit

Myself and several others are in the process of developing a prototype that uses Omeka for the POYi Competition. For those of you unaware, the POYi competition is a world renown journalism event that dates back to 1943. Every year the judging committee (including several Pulitzer Prize winners) accepts photograph submissions that are judged by category, composition, etc... We have some really quality content and are genuinely excited about it.

Anyway, right now the goal is to develop a new online presence for the POYi competition. The current one located at: [www.poyi.org] could stand some major work. To resolve it's problems we have decided to start over. The plan is to use Drupal to host the main POYi site and Omeka to structure, describe, and present the archived winning images. There are roughly 35,000+ of them!

I'm not sure where the project will take us at this point but hopefully Omeka will continue to fit into the equation. It's support for metadata and displays certainly is something we want to keep!

AJMillion,
Neat project. Omeka can definitely handle the size of your photo archive. Have you used the dropbox yet to test batch adding files?

Thanks for sharing.
Sheila

Actually, we have been using it. :) It's nice to have a batch tool when dealing with more than 10 files at once. The only problem, and I brought this up in another thread, was that the plug-in dosen't have a way to batch associate metadata. In my case I have several Excell files of information just waiting to be entered. I know you guys are eventually planning to offering support for this, but it might be nice to be able to map various internal and external fields. Especially since you are using Dublin Core. I did something very similar last year with the University of Illinois Archon program and it saved tons of time.

I'm glad to see the administrative staff involved with end-users.

Yes, there is a CSV translator in the works that would allow you to export your Excel into CSV and then import that into Omeka.

By any chance can you share some of the work you did with the Archon program? Might be helpful to our digital archivist who is busily toiling away. If yes, I can put you in touch with him (off-line).

Thanks,
Sheila

No problemo. I actually worked for the Missouri Historical Society on the Richard A. Gephardt Papers Project. The bulk of work was general processing (*ick*), but during the second year they brought in myself and three others to digitize. I think we ended out scanning like 2,500 photos and recording a god awful amount of AV materials. In addition to the processing of course. If you are interested check out the Archon Server and look at the Gephardt finding aids:

http://archon.mohistory.org/

We made a few modifications to Archon's PHP and display. Unfortunately, I'm not completely sure of the details right now, because my boss farmed some of our web development out although I am still in contact with her. The big things we did were to add an export option within Archon, use that to import the same information to ContentDM, and then sync the two using a staticURL. This let us enter metadata in Archon but copy it (along with the associated files) for ContentDM to upload. At one point we validated all of our finding aids against the EAD DTD but some changes have been made since then too.

But yea, if the archivist is still interested I'd be glad to help him out if I can. The only problem is I'm fairly busy as of late and may take a day or so to respond. I take it you have my e-mail? Also, as far as Archon goes he might want to get in contact with Chris Prom. I'm not sure about "trade secrets" or whatnot, but he was very helpful with us.

Thanks for all of the info

AJMillion could you please share with me how you were able to "metadata in Archon but copy it (along with the associated files) for ContentDM to upload." I have been trying to do this but what ARCHON exports does not perfectly fit with CONTENTdm and I have missing/duplicate data. Thank you for your help!