Frontmatter
Abstract
Omeka is a free Content Management System (CMS) and a web publishing system built by and for scholars that is used by hundreds of archives, historical societies, libraries, museums, and individual researchers and teachers to create searchable online databases and scholarly online interpretations of their digital collections. Omeka allows to describe the items according to archival standards, import and export that descriptive information from other systems, and to create as many interpretive online exhibits as you like from those items.
Through this workshop, we are going to explore different ways to use Omeka in the classroom, with a focus on its pedagogical and public-facing capacities.
Learning Objectives
In this workshop, you will learn the following skills:
- Assessing whether Omeka is a tool that matches your learning objectives
- Get acquainted with some project ideas to develop in your class and their desirable outcomes
- Best practices to plan a course that uses Omeka as a tool to learn about archives and to produce public-facing assignments
Estimated time
One hour.
Prerequisites
Pre-reading suggestions
- "What Do We Mean by 'Digital Archives?'"
- "Teaching With Digital Archives in the First-Year Writing Classroom"
- Allison C. Marsh, "Omeka in the Classroom: The Challenges of Teaching Material Culture in a Digital World." Literary and Linguistic Computing, Volume 28, Issue 2, June 2013, Pages 279–282.
Projects that use these skills
- Fifteenth-Century Italian Art (by Nicole Riesenberger)
- Goin’ North
- Ice Age Flood Explorer (by Chad Pritchard, Larry Cebula, and Paul Lindholdt)
- James Monroe Papers (by Alexandra deGraffenreid, Seth Mintzer, MacKenzie Murphy, Chris Wright)
- Fredericksburg: City of Hospitals (by Jeffrey McClurken)
- The Berkeley Revolution (by Scott Saul) – please note: not an Omeka site, but easily replicable with Omeka
Ethical Considerations
When working with digital archives, you want to keep in mind issues concerning intellectual property, privacy, discoverability, accessibility, and sustainabiltiy. Head over to our Intro to Omeka workshop to read more about these matters.
Resources (optional)
Acknowledgements
- Current Author: Stefano Morello
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
