2015-08-20

assessmemnt

events tracking

Part of our assessment project (for ourselves & the library)
DSG has used Podio to create an Events form
Amanda demos

consulting

Library likes to keep track of how much we consult w/ other departments
Podio also has a new form that Amanda has created (w/ Sarah's help) to track consultation

mentoring

The NULab Practicum class will potentially be looking for mentors for students interested in particular areas. JF asked members of the DSG staff if they were willing to share knowledge in particular areas:

LM interested in programming topics
SB in XML, XPath, XSLT, TEI, RELAX NG, etc.
AC ditto (including XQuery)
BS geo-spatial
HC © & fair use; open access

Omeka under the hood

JM gave a brief overview of Omeka:

Background

content management system
"wordpress for museums"
was used on Our Marathon
ECDA started in it, then went elsewhere
DRS does some of same stuff better
May be a presence on campus where students being asked to gather & curate
Hx dept interested

DSG & Omeka

Our Marathon

using old version of Omeka
highly customized
Reclaim hosting has a one-click install
(Ryan C. uses that service)

structure

has items, which have metadata
uses basic DC metadata; also has item types (w/ additional metadata for some kinds of types, which Our Marathon did not use)
plugin for extended
collections is a set of items
item can only be in 1 collection
Omeka does not have sets
Omeka does have exhibits, more curational than sets of DRS
also has tags

search

capability less than optimal and has a somewhat icky interface
e.g., will not search on words ≤ 3 chars long, so "red sox" …

exhibit

An exhibit has pages
A method of hand-creating a page that draws on items
Various options for arrangement of text & images with a drag-and-drop interface
Seems you can either link to an item or suck it in
PY reports exhibits used to be very buggy; JM's experience is not so buggy
Omeka originally designed for 1 person to be creating site, so when multiple folks work on it there are problems
Simple Pages are just blank slate for exhibit page, rather than a template (or, perhaps, a blank template … :-)

neatline

exhibit-building plug-in
lets people tell stories using maps & timelines
often require lots of customization
can use Google Maps templates
create records that link items (and their metadata) to things on your map
by default all your metdata pops up
JM describes a method of getting around this problem (that I did not catch)
Our Marathon hacked neatline a bit
Basic neatline template is pretty simplistic — image on top, text underneath

summary

JM: "I'm not in love with Omeka"
Has some interesting capabilities for creating certain types of sites; i.e. is useful.
There are forums for support.
JM recommends DSG have guidelines on how to use Omeka in a manner that makes ingestion into DRS easier
Mostly useful for class projects; public digital hx, etc.