Omeka: The New Primary Source Anthology?

Sounds like a very useful/cool resource. I’d be interested in hearing more about it and your experience with using it!

One thing I hear continually from my colleagues and friends who teach history courses, specifically survey/Gen. Ed.-style courses, is the serious lack of student engagement. The relevance of history isn’t necessarily obvious to a chemistry or physical therapy major, especially the first/second-year undergraduates who take these courses.

I could see Omeka being used to create a a series of modestly-sized, high-quality collections of primary sources based around undergraduate majors. The idea would be show students who have a primary interest in other academic areas the relevance of history to their fields of interest (founding principles, important developments, key figures, etc.).

By having all these sources in one place and housed in Omeka, one can avoid the pitfalls of the colossal lists of links which are often out-of-date or simply overwhelming to beginning undergrads. It could hopefully serve as a tool to give faculty a better way to connect history and the practice of history to students who often can’t or won’t see why they should care.

I’m extremely interested in using Omeka to create primary source archives in relation to my own research and teaching. So, I’m glad you’ve raised this topic. Like you, I’m thinking of this in relation to my dissertation (which looks at the wartime work of museums) as well future projects. My research on museum activities during past wars takes me to the archives, but my efforts to study museum engagements with the current war are largely dependent upon Internet sources, such as the exhibition pages on museum Web sites, press releases issued as PDFs, reviews from online media, etc., supplemented by my own fieldwork. The latter includes visiting exhibits, taking photographs, recording interviews, collecting printed matter, and sketching exhibition floor plans. As you can imagine, it would be great to have all this stuff in one convenient, accessible location vs. dislocated in a series of digital spaces and physical filing cabinets. I’ll have more to say about this on my session proposal, which piggy-backs on yours.

I’ve been playing around on a limited basis (limited because I know zero about altering code) with Omeka as a tool to perform the basic data archiving. What I really envision, however, is something that would also allow collaborative interactions. I’ve found Omeka, which I first used on a version installed at school, to be very easy and intuitive to use. I could only get part way toward my goals, however, using the software as is. Because the university install was a shared resource I wasn’t allowed to make changes (i.e., get things to look and act like the great example sites to which you linked), so I switched to an Omeka.net site. My site is just bare bones at the moment but I find I’m able to do less than I remember being able to do with the university-hosted one. So, I’m thinking about a self-hosted site.

One important issue (of the many) that you raised is that of copyright not only for an anthology but also for a shared research database. How do we collect, store and share the sorts of born-digital materials that I mentioned above when we’re not the creators? Where is the line between fair use and infringement?

I’m interested in this session too. I’ve long wanted to have separate websites [or OMEKA sites in this case] for each class I teach with compilations of various primary sources. In some sense, this is what I do with blackboard [the newer versions make it easier to compile visual, audio, text], but I’d like something more attractive, more curator friendly, and also a model students could do themselves. [I can see assigning students to compile sources around a particular topic for their own final project]. Can someone tell me if one can use OMEKA on a macbook? I looked into it a few months ago, and it didn’t seem quite possible then. Have things changed?