Hi Kimon,
again, many thanks for organizing and hosting last week’s workshop at the BGC!
Following up on your suggestion that we could submit ideas about possible OMEKA workshop topics, well, here are my two pennies:
1 / OMEKA and Preservation: Best Practices for Students, Researchers, and Institutions
Since OMEKA is designed for ephemeral web publishing, I would be very interested in learning more about the options available for the backup and storage of both item records and exhibits.
The matter seems relevant to teaching because students need to learn not only about digital tools, but also about their own responsibility for storing and retaining access to their research data, whether this be the item collection which forms the backbone of their writing assignment or the writing assignment itself.
Related issues are debated among OMEKA users (e.g., http://omeka.org/forums/topic/store-files-externally), and perhaps OMEKA’s development team is already exploring these issues.
While I am comfortable with publishing exhibits on the web which are not supposed to be eternal — whatever that would mean on the web — the questions also arises whether in the long run both individual and institutional OMEKA users would need to band together to create something like a dedicated OMEKA storage space, which accepts peer-reviewed OMEKA publications (cf. the storage of archeological data in http://opencontext.org/). After all, libraries retain rarely used holdings because of their valuable contents (cf. the 80-20 rule according to which 100 percent of patrons are reading 20 percent of a library’s holdings).
2 / OMEKA vis-a-vis Copyright, Creative Commons licenses, and Open Access
The historian and archivist Klaus Graf published last week a German blog post about the legal intricacies related to the use of manuscript scans on the internet in connection with OA publications and CC licenses.
http://redaktionsblog.hypotheses.org/2417
Klaus Graf’s post reminded me of your comment that at the BGC your students were mostly relying on the holdings of other institutions whenever submitting writing assignments in OMEKA.
Taken together with Stacy’s remark that the metadata of images are different from the metadata of objects, legal issues are important whenever OMEKA is used for publishing about objects owned by a range of institutions. Conversely, this topic may be of little interest to institutions that rely on OMEKA to exclusively showcase their own holdings.
Best wishes,
Dagmar
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