Omeka is a free and open source web-publishing platform that is great for managing research collections, especially if they contain a lot of images, videos or other multimedia. It can be used privately, to manage resources, but can also be used to create public-facing exhibitions to share some or all of a collection.
There are a number of reasons why you may teach Omeka. It is a useful tool for researchers who collect a lot of images or media files as part of their research. It uses Dublin-core metadata, and this workshop spends a bit of time exploring metadata and how to structure a collection for future usefulness. It is also useful for researchers who have found that a spreadsheet or table isn't enough but for whom a relational database would be excessive.
This workshop emphasises the relationship between data management and Omeka. It also goes deeper into some of the customisation options than other workshops available online.
This workshop is designed to take about 90 minutes. It covers:
- What is Omeka
- Components in Omeka
- Organising your data
- Getting started with Omeka
- Adding content
- Customising Omeka
- Creating an exhibition
By the end of the workshop, participants should:
- Understand how to structure a research collection in order to draw connections between items
- Understand how the importance of metadata in managing a collection
- Understand how elements in Omeka relate to each other
- Be able to add items to Omeka, describe them and share them
Credits
This workshop draws on Up and Running with Omeka.net from The Programming Historian by Miriam Posner and Introduction to Omeka - Lesson Plan by Amanda French
Omeka.org provides some really detailed help in its Documentation section and you can also find help in its Forums