I’m finally allowed to let this out! One of my two Omeka exhibit sites is online: American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives Digital Exhibits (at the Catholic University of America).
I can’t take any credit for content curation or copy in the Strishock exhibit, but I did help digitize the prints using a Kirtas SkyView scanner, and I entered some metadata. Then I used some SQL and even Excel to clean up the in-house archival metadata and convert it into Dublin Core records so it could be imported into Omeka.
Omeka itself was a bit of a learning experience. This instance isn’t as heavily customized as the instance used in my other project (still under development and not yet open to the public). A few small but significant changes to the PHP code of Omeka itself were necessary to get the Google Custom Search Engine box to work. I’m not sure that this was the best way to do it, but it was what I was able to do with the time I had. Someday I’d love to figure out how to move this functionality into a theme. Now that I am finally online again at home, I plan on posting an Omeka “recipe” explaining how I got that to work as soon as I can. I also experimented with a lot of changes that you won’t see here because they turned out to be unnecessary in the end. The majority of the changes you see here are in-house customizations of Chris Raymond’s colorful Rhythm theme. For the non-technically inclined, anything that can be changed in the theme is vastly preferable to anything that necessitates changing the actual Omeka code (especially if you ever plan to upgrade).
So now comes the task of cleaning up in-house documentation and my own messy notes to write something detailed and useful that will share what I’ve learned with others. It might also help if anyone has questions they want to ask me directly. I would love to hear about other people’s experiences customizing Omeka, and I still have a lot to learn myself.
I would be remiss if I did not thank Shanyun Zhang at CUA; Jonathan Smith, formerly of CUA and now at California State University, San Bernardino; Jim Austin at the WRLC; Jeremy Boggs, formerly of CHNM and now with the UVA Scholars’ Lab; everyone on the Omeka forums; and other co-conspirators that I’m sure I’m forgetting. Their help and advice during this project was invaluable. A hearty thanks also goes out to all the staff members at the CUA University Archives for their patience and sense of humor throughout this project.
