Message from the Director
Dear Friends,
With the fracturing of social media in recent years, all of us have faced challenges with keeping in touch and abreast of new developments in the field of digital cultural heritage. This is certainly true for the Omeka Team, where we miss the lively dialogue and sharing that our users formerly engaged in on Twitter. While our forums provide an open space for people to ask questions and to get assistance, sustained dialogue is hard in that space.
In an effort to strengthen the avenues of communication between the development team and the many users, designers, and developers out in the world who regularly work with Omeka, next month we are launching a series of quarterly community calls. Every three months we will invite all interested parties to join us for a brief presentation of our current work followed by an open dialogue about the platforms. We want to know what you are working on, what your stumbling blocks are, and what you would like the platforms to do in the future.
Register here to access the Zoom invitation for our first Community Call.
I hope you’ll join us on December 4 and share your work!
With my best wishes for a peaceful holiday season, Sharon
New Developments
Last month, the Omeka Team released a set of add-ons that facilitate the integration of all Omeka platforms with the Local Contexts project. Local Contexts Labels allow Indigenous communities and local organizations to clearly articulate the conditions for sharing, use, and future engagement around collections and data in which they have an interest. Local Contexts Notices enable data and collections holders to mark that they recognize Indigenous rights and interests in those materials and, furthermore, to signal that they want to collaborate with Indigenous stakeholders to articulate the appropriate terms and conditions related to those materials. Once the parties have embarked up on that collaboration, together they can display the results of their deliberations using the Local Contexts Labels.
Since Omeka’s very first release, the platforms have been designed to support open access to both digitalized collections materials and the robust metadata that describes those collections. We have worked hard to encourage standards and protocols that facilitate the free exchange, aggregation, and reuse of materials. Our recent post on supporting FAIR data principles is just our latest articulation of this commitment to open access. However, the preferential option for open access cannot be absolute or uncritical. The sharing of collections and data involving Indigenous peoples, their interests, their archives, and their cultural heritage materials necessitates collaboration with those communities on the degree and manner of access which is appropriate. The Local Contexts Labels and Notices help facilitate that collaboration and will enable Omeka users to engage in more responsible collections stewardship, and we are pleased to be able to support our users in upholding these principles in their digital cultural heritage projects with Omeka.net, Omeka Classic, and Omeka S.
See also… The Static Site Export plugin for exporting static sites is now available for download and use with your Omeka S sites.
Spotlight: International Center for the Arts of the Americas Documents Project
This quarter’s Omeka newsletter Spotlight is the ICAA Documents Project. This Omeka S project houses over 9,000 documents of 20th and 21st-century art in Latin America, the Caribbean, and among US Latino communities. Cutting across national and cultural boundaries, the digital archive and accompanying publications provide an intellectual foundation for the exhibition, collection, and interpretation of art produced along this cultural axis. This digital archive provides global access to archival materials while simultaneously connecting geographically dispersed scholars and other producers of knowledge. Vocabularies include a custom ontology for the Archive data structure and a custom vocabulary server for values integrated into the ValueSuggest module. There is also a spinoff site, The CAYC Files, for a particular archive subset. Explore the collections and learn more about the project today.
Share your work with us for inclusion in our directories, and for a possible future Spotlight!
Meet the Team
Name: Matthew McKinley
Role: Developer
How long have you been with Omeka?
Since August 2020 – a little over 5 years
What work have you done that our community would be familiar with?
Mostly I work on modules–I’ve developed the Item Carousel Block, Persistent Identifiers and Data Repository Connector modules for Omeka S, among others.
Do you have a favorite project you’ve worked on or just a favorite part of working with the Omeka team/community?
I earned my MSIS and have worked in the Library/Archives/Museums world my whole career, and I love how many kind, clever people I encounter doing interesting and important work. The Omeka team and user community is absolutely no exception. As an example, I’ve recently been working with the Local Contexts team to see about integrating Traditional Knowledge Labels and Notices into Omeka S, and have found the unique informational and rights management needs of indigenous communities just fascinating.
What’s a fun fact about you?
Over the pandemic, my partner and I somehow decided to watch every movie Nicolas Cage has ever made, in release order. With over 100 screen credits, it took a while! It started as kind of a joke, but by the end we were more than impressed by how entertaining and watchable he is as an actor in even the worst film. Truly a National Treasure (pun fully intended).
Omeka in the World
The Omeka Team was thrilled to return to the Museum Computing Network conference in Minneapolis this October, after a hiatus. We launched the Omeka.net service with an announcement at the 2010 conference, and it was enriching to reconnect with so many old friends and share the news of all the features and developments for Omeka Classic and Omeka S over the last several years.
Museum strategist and evaluator, Kate Haley Goldman visits the Omeka table at MCN to learn about recent new offerings for the platforms.
Upcoming Event: December Community Call
Join us for our first Community Call on December 4 from 11:00am until 12:30pm EDT. We’ll discuss theming patterns and ways to use templates to customize the look and feel of your Omeka S site pages.
Come prepared to share a project you would like to showcase!
This will be the first of a quarterly series of conversations, so we hope to speak with you again in February, May, and August.