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VRAlocal14: Unpacking Our Wares: Using Omeka for Virtual Exhibits, Hall
- 1. OMEKA @ JHU.EDU Macie Hall Senior Instructional Designer Center for Educational Resources Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University
- 2. Who is using OMEKA @ JHU? Sheridan Libraries and Museums
- 3. Who is using OMEKA @ JHU? JHU collaboration with the Afro- American Newspaper Archives http://morgue.afro.com/AfroOmeka/
- 4. Who is using OMEKA @ JHU? Faculty teaching under-graduate courses: History of Science
- 5. Introduction to digital and visual literacy skills Finding images Metadata and data standards Cataloguing Copyright and fair use
- 6. Who is using OMEKA @ JHU? Faculty teaching under-graduate courses: Museums & Society
- 7. JHU Collections Web Mark Dion’s An Archaeology of Knowledge, A Wunderkammer in the Brody Learning Commons on Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus. Photos by Will Kirk.
- 8. JHU Collections Web 1) A site that would not only host student research findings and teach digital literacy skills, but would allow students to raise conceptual questions important for the digital humanities 2) A site that would use the technical capacity of Omeka to allow students to analyze and draw connections among the objects being studied.
- 9. JHU Collections Web “…a particularly difficult challenge was to determine how to link the metadata to tell the best story and reveal significant connections, which may be as much a conceptual challenge concerning the collection as it is a logistical one.” Reid Szerba Multimedia Designer Center for Educational Resources http://collectionsweb.jhu.edu/
- 10. Live Demo of JHU Collections Web Please go to http://collectionsweb.jhu.edu/ and you can follow along with the text below or feel free to explore!
- 11. Item Creation – Data Standards
- 12. Exhibits Template – Explore Page
- 13. Exhibits Template – Page Form
- 14. http://collectionsweb.jhu.edu/ Macie Hall Center for Educational Resources Johns Hopkins University macie.hall@jhu.edu
Editor's Notes
- The Sheridan Libraries and Museums at Johns Hopkins have adopted Omeka as the platform for virtual exhibitions. A current project, from our Special Collections and Archives, is being worked on by library staff and students and centers around the history of student life at Hopkins.
- It has also been used in a collaborative project between the library, the Program in Africana Studies, and the Baltimore Afro-American Newspaper.
- My involvement with Omeka use has been supporting faculty who choose Omeka as a platform for student projects. One example that is now in its second iteration is in the History of Science and Technology department. Working with CER staff, Professor Bob Kargon developed a course entitled Modernity on Display: Technology and Ideology in the Era of World War II. Looking at the post World War I world’s fairs and expositions as cultural indicators, he wanted his students to explore themes and ideas around the concept of modernity. He also recognized the value of extending student digital literacy and saw that one way to accomplish his goal would be to have students identify, collect and catalog images, maps, texts, and multi-media materials to create a virtual exhibit that would serve as a term project.
- The project assignment included writing a narrative exhibit catalog as well as organizing and cataloguing the media materials. The students were taught about Dublin Core and other metadata standards, came to understand why cataloguing images can be complex and complicated, and learned about relevant copyright and fair use practices. Library, Visual Resources Collection, and CER staff were involved in teaching these sessions. In the assessment survey and focus group conducted at the end of the course, the students noted that working with images and learning the complexity of image interpretation, cataloguing, and use in narrative had been an eye-opening experience.
- Since time is short, I want to focus on another course and give you a live demonstration of what we developed. The Museum Studies Omeka site has involved a fair amount of programming to achieve specific goals outlined by two faculty members in our Museums and Society program, Jen Kingsley and Elizabeth Rodini. This project, The JHU Collections Web: 21st-Century Approaches to the Study and Interpretation of Material Culture seeks to teach students how to work with historic Hopkins collections using new and emerging technologies of research, analysis, and presentation. Students will present their findings in an interactive website built and supported on the Omeka platform.
- Their starting point is a new installation in the library’s Brody Learning Commons, created by the artist Mark Dion. An Archaeology of Knowledge, A Wunderkammer contains more than 700 objects borrowed from across the university. Housed in a 20-feet high by eight-feet wide laboratory cabinet, Dion’s wunderkammer tells the history of the university by displaying items ranging from ancient Roman inscriptions and a vintage university library card catalog, to glass pipettes, miniature books, and a sculpture of Johns Hopkins, the university’s founder and namesake.
- Our two faculty members wanted to achieve two goals. They wanted: 1) A site that would not only host student research findings and teach digital literacy skills, but would allow students to raise conceptual questions important for the digital humanities, and 2) A site that would use the technical capacity of Omeka to allow students to analyze and, very importantly, draw connections among the objects being studied.
- Our multimedia programmer had this to say about the project: “…a particularly difficult challenge was to determine how to link the metadata to tell the best story and reveal significant connections, which may be as much a conceptual challenge concerning the collection as it is a logistical one.” Let’s take a quick look at the site. http://collectionsweb.jhu.edu/ DEMO
- Omeka is a LAMP application meaning that it uses the Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database, and PHP programming. The first step was to determine what we wanted out of Omeka, what information we wanted to share and how we wanted to present it. Our programmer started with an existing template and modified it. We are looking at the Home page. Currently there are about 20 objects from the Wunderkammer that have been catalogued as examples. Students taking the class this semester are in the process of adding another 50 or so objects. You can see that there are several ways to explore the collections. Click on the changing display to see a random object. Or Browse Or Explore Select Sloth Skeleton Three questions are asked about each object. The answers tell the story of What it is? (click on) How did it come to Hopkins? (click on) And Why is it Significant? (click on) The icons take us to additional relevant materials to help us understand more about the object. The real power is in the Connections area. Students, in cataloguing each object, fill in a content form, which in some fields uses controlled vocabularies and/or standardized formats (i.e, for date ranges). Guidance is provided for tagging. The Metadata and Tags images are auto-generated from the form to produce the Connected objects. By hovering over these Connections, we can see how each of these objects relates to our sloth skeleton. And can explore further, finding additional connections and building our own stories about the collection of objects. Back to Explore Tab Explore the Web: An additional feature allows us to explore the entire web of connections among the objects. This is not an Omeka feature, but rather a JavaScript library called D3 that allows for data visualization in a browser. This uses the same metadata and tagging criteria (click on boxes to demo) as the Explore pages to show the relationships among the objects. Filtering is possible (Creator, Provenance), as is limiting results to see the most significant relationships.
- After conducting their initial research, students begin with the Item Creation process in Omeka. This screenshot shows the data entry form. Omeka uses Dublin Core with its field descriptions, but we have expanded on the descriptions to provide a better fit for the objects being catalogued, for example Spatial Coverage is used to provide information about provenance. You can also see an example of controlled vocabulary.
- Although our programmer started with an existing Omeka theme and a template for the pages, he heavily modified them. The themes and templates present the database records in a specific way. Using an Omeka plugin called Exhibit Builder, he extended the template so that we could show multiple records on the same page as related to the metadata and tagging under the Connections section of the page. The extended template allowed for the auto-generation of a page for each item with the connections shown based on the metadata and tagging.
- In addition to the Item Creation Form, students fill out a Page Form that creates the display page. Here they enter the What? How? and Why? information that will be displayed, as well as any additional content to be linked.
- The site is open to the public, so I encourage you to take a closer look at your leisure!