Omeka Workshop

Instructors: Melissa McAfee and Lisa Cox

*** Course FULL***

Classroom: McLaughlin Library Room 246B

The Omeka Workshop will provide a thorough introduction to Omeka, a user-friendly web-based publishing platform for creating, displaying, curating, and interpreting digital collections. The Omeka Showcase lists nearly 300 sites created by academics, librarians, and independent researchers in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere. Omeka’s simple interface for managing and describing diverse digital objects such as images, audio, video, and text, makes it easy for those without coding or information technology experience to create a DH site for research projects, teaching, or promoting special collections.

The course will include hands-on instruction in every step of building an Omeka site from building a repository to curating online exhibits and visualization projects. Participants will be introduced to the web-based Omeka.net and the highly-customizable server-base Omeka.org platforms. Each participant will receive their own Omeka instance to use for the duration of the course and will be given time each day to apply what they have learned to develop their own projects. By the end of the course, everyone will have laid a preliminary foundation for their own Omeka project.

Topics covered will include:
● How to plan an Omeka site and project
● How to use basic Omeka features
● How to use Omeka plugins, such as Contribution, Docs Viewer, Exhibit Builder, Geolocation Simple Pages, Simple Vocab, etc.
● How to create and manage high quality digital objects from original materials in archives and rare book collections to build a digital repository
● How to create metadata describing digital objects using Dublin Core
● How to curate online exhibits and course modules
● How to create timelines and maps using Neatline
● How to use Omeka in the classroom

The course will be taught by scholars, librarians, and developers with experience in teaching Omeka and creating Omeka projects such as the University of Guelph’s Scottish Chapbook Project and the Rural Diary Archive. Cases studies of Omeka sites from the University of Guelph and other institutions will also be featured to show the ways in which Omeka has been employed for building exhibits, creating repositories of digital collections, and for digital pedagogy projects.

Intended Audience:

This course is intended for students, librarians, archivists, faculty, scholars, high school and middle school teachers, museum curators and genealogists as an introduction to building an Omeka site for research projects, teaching, and as a repository for promoting special collections, rare books, and archives. Experience using Omeka is not required.