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Very brief notes from my session on using Omeka.

Omeka is best suited for collections-based sites, where individual pieces, ie items, are described with Dublin Core metadata.

General categories of most Omeka sites: archiving, exhibiting, collecting, teaching.
See examples sites in the Showcase wiki (many highly customized sites): omeka.org/codex/View_Sites_Powered_by_Omeka

Do I need the downloadable version that I host or the Omeka.net hosted version?

• Comparison chart Org vs Net
• Downloadable: Omeka.org/download. Good idea to visit Documentation’s preparing to install, helps you find what you need ahead of time, suggestions for hosting.
• Hosted: Sign up for a free account, to test out Omeka basic funcationality and admin UI, or start building a site.

As with any site, you will want to set goals for the site, outline content—and know exactly what will be available on the site, and know your audience.

Try these Site Planning Tips to help you think about Omeka as a system and what it can do for you. There are many links to the documentation from this page that explain items, item types, collections, exhibits, and simple web pages.

Omeka’s core application is an archiving system, with an item as a building block, and it is extended through plugins. Front-facing design is controlled by a theme.

Start with our fantastic documentation: omeka.org/codex; when you have questions, post to forums: omeka.org/forums.

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cc-licensed photo "Love of My Life" by Amanda *Bake It Pretty"

In the spirit of Dan’s grab-bag of ideas, here are three things I’m thinking about:

1. Engagement Analytics
As teachers, instructional technologists, and project managers, many of us have been involved in the creation of new, open-source spaces for teaching and learning. As those spaces become increasingly networked and increasingly open to student content, enabling a student-as-producer paradigm, they offer students multiple ways to connect to their classmates,to their educational institutions, and to the wider public. They open up new possibilities, in short, for students to become more engaged with their own learning experiences.

“Engagement” is a great term — I love using it to describe my central pedagogical goals — but what does it mean in practice? And, at a time when educational institutions are preoccupied with assessment, how do we measure it? What kinds of data should we be looking at as we strive to show our administrations and our funding agencies that, say, an open-source platform can foster more (or different) student engagement than a siloed, proprietary system like Blackboard? What kinds of measurements from social network analysis can be used in an educational paradigm? And, most importantly, how can we create analytics that are aligned with an ethical perspective that respects student privacy and autonomy, and that refuses the dystopian paradigm of the CMS-as-panopticon?

2. The Future of RSS
Is RSS dead? Dying? Or  have reports of its death been exaggerated? And what can we do about it? Are there ways we can build support and development for RSS into our digital projects to help build a sustainable ecosystem around it to help it thrive? To what extent should we be concerned about the future of RSS and to what extent do we have a responsibility (or ability) to keep it alive?

3. Baby Photos!
Yes, baby photos. Like many other DHers, I have a small child at home. This child has loving grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends who want a steady supply of baby photos. But I don’t want to use proprietary systems and services like Flickr, Picassa, Kodak, Shutterfly, Tumblr, etc., to share photos because I have ethical, privacy, and sustainability concerns about such systems.

Instead, I want to build an open-source solution that has the following characteristics:

1. Can be password-protected (I want a private site) but can be easily accessed by relatives who are not at all technically literate;

2. Offers ways to easily download and print photos;

3. Allows for easy batch-uploading of photos;

4. Allows metadata to be applied to batches of photos;

5. Allows movies to be embedded on pages;

6. Allows email notification of new posts on the password-protected site.

The closest I’ve come to such as system is a password-protected WordPress blog with the NextGen Gallery plugin for photo management and Subscribe2 for email notifications. I’ve been unsatisfied with NextGen, however (though I haven’t used its most recent versions — maybe it has improved), because the batch uploading and tagging capabilities seem clunky.

So, I’m curious to hear about what systems others use for baby photos. And, if the perfect system does not exist, I’d like to sit down with someone to spec out a better one.