Today’s Training: Omeka
I practiced adding items (image files) to my Omeka site and created an Exhibit showing image files and descriptions with metadata (following the Dublin Core standard).
Today’s Reflection Question:
- How would you feel about helping someone else learn how to use Omeka? What did you find most interesting? What did you find most frustrating? What questions do you still have, and what parts of the tool do you want to explore more deeply?
I found the instruction from the training website (see sources) very straightforward and easy to follow and implement. Overall, I feel confident in my ability to help someone learn the skills that I just learned.
The thing I found most interesting was getting a sense of the hierarchy and nesting relationship between the different datatypes on Omeka, such as item, collection, and exhibit, as well as installing themes and plugins on the admin page. This created a small confusion when I accidentally repeated the same name for the title of the exhibit as a whole and the page that would be nested inside it. This made a ‘duplicate-looking’ page inside the exhibit, so I made changes to ensure the title pages represent the title of the item (e.g. in my case, an example of a page was ‘Bone of Metadone’, taken from a title of the image I uploaded).
[an image of the fixed Exhibit page on Omeka, after I edited the title of the page nested inside. Note for the future: it would be best to keep screenshots from before (when I encounter challenges/make mistakes) and after (after the changes are made) to include in the reflection. ]
From getting started with Omeka through this tutorial, I get the impression that Omeka, compared to WordPress, is well-suited for the maintenance and publication of web content and collections. I can now see Omeka as a helpful tool for the project I am working on with a project lead, as it involves the categorization and publication of files in different properties and contents. However, I still somewhat feel more confident in using WordPress as an ‘all-in-one’ tool, and would like to explore more Omeka to be able to identify its unique capabilities and specific use cases.
Sources: ‘Omeka for Vivellos’ guide on the Vivero Peer Mentoring site