Working with Omeka

The time has come to finally create my thematic research collection about Clemson Men in World War II. To do this, I’m using an open-source platform called Omeka S, which allows me to upload digital surrogates of my archival items as well as to create pages in a sort of mini website.

This is the first time I’ve used Omeka. Being a long-time WordPress user, it’s hard not to compare the user interface in Omeka with that in WordPress. However, this is not really a fair comparison, because WordPress has a much larger community of users and developers and was built for publishing, while Omeka has a smaller audience and a more specialized purpose for archives management.

Omeka is centered around items and metadata (i.e. data about data). In the back end, it seems to do this pretty well. You create each item in a similar way to creating a post in WordPress, in this case with numerous custom fields to fill with metadata. A nice feature is that you can load metadata vocabularies like Dublin Core into the system and create resource templates, which you can select at the item level. What is time consuming, however, is filling out all the metadata fields. Whether you do this in a spreadsheet prior to entering the data in Omeka, or at the time of data entry, it will take some time, especially if, like me, you have dozens of items to create. I believe there is a way to “bulk edit” items in Omeka, but it would also be nice to “bulk upload” items. For example, if you have a .csv file with all your metadata, you could import it into Omeka instead of copying the metadata into each field. This would save a tremendous amount of tedious data entry. As usual, WordPress has this feature for many post types, such as products and users. Speaking of metadata, choosing the right values is also a challenge. For instance, you need to find out the copyright status of each item. You also need to think about which Library of Congress Subject Headings to include.

While Omeka is designed to store metadata for items, it also displays this information on the front end. This is where your “site” comes in. In my case, I created several pages, one for each section of my project. Omeka has a feature for navigation, so that you can create a menu of pages that will run along the top of the site. I would prefer a right sidebar for the navigation, because there is not much room at the top for long page titles. Perhaps this is an option in other Omeka themes?

To be honest, I wasn’t impressed by the user interface of the page edit screen. On the right hand side, you have a list of “blocks” that you can add to your page. One of them is called “HTML,” which is probably not the most intuitive title for non-tech-savvy users. Unlike WordPress, which comes with a text editor field built-in, Omeka requires you to add it to the page. The HTML block gives you some basic settings, but it’s nothing to write home about. In order to add, say, an image to your text, you have to add a “Media Embed” block. This means that you have to continue your text by adding a new HTML block after it. With the block editor in WordPress, you also have to do this to some extent, but you can just start typing after the text without having to insert a new block manually. Again, Omeka is not built for publishing, but it would be nice for the user experience to be more seamless here.

I was also a bit disappointed with how Omeka handles the organization of the items. This is probably due to misplaced expectations on my part, but I had envisioned attaching groups of items to each section in a more concrete way. Your entire collection of items is called an “Item Set,” but there is not another organizational level below that. You must attach items to a page by going into the page editor and adding an “Item showcase” block. This block allows you to add attachments in bulk and has settings for the order of the attachments and the size of the thumbnail. Once you save the page, your items will appear on the front end in a sort of grid. Unfortunately, you can’t view these items as groups in the back end as, for example, you can see categories of posts in WordPress. This is also an issue on the front end with the “Browse all items” page, which does not let you view the items based on groups.

Another issue I ran into with Omeka was the thumbnails. They work fine for jpegs, but most of my items are in pdf format, which do not generate thumbnails by default. You have to add the thumbnails manually. Moreover, these pdf thumbnails don’t appear on the individual item pages; instead there is a link to the pdf with a long, auto-generated file name. We had to use a PDF Embed plugin to fix it, but I don’t think this should be an extra feature.

It may seem from the above that I don’t like Omeka, but that’s not the case. Overall, Omeka gets the job done and is definitely an asset for archives management. I think perhaps I’ve been “spoiled” by WordPress so that it’s hard for me to be satisfied with anything else, but Omeka is a step in the right direction for digital history. It’s exciting to finally see my thematic research collection come together online. In just a few days, it will be released into the wild of the internet. Stay tuned!

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