[Patrick Murray-John]

This event sounds very fun, and yeah, seems an evolution from previous DH rocking/groking formats. Which is welcome!

In the spirit of putting something together, I’ve recently been working on our group’s thoughts about code and licenses (that’s the Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University). In particular, this really needed some tightening up. It’s not posted yet, but the idea is that there are lots of foundational thoughts about DH centers and the declarations of licenses involved.

Anyone else had these convos about open source code production in DH places, with or without lawyers? What licenses on code do you gravitate toward and why? How do license choices reflect your organization’s identity? How much control is there in your group for assigning a license?

If anyone out there has encountered these questions, I think it’d make a good panel discussion for this event. If there are folks who would like to speak to their experiences in this domain, I’m happy to try to pull it together into a panel proposal. Just lemme know either here or at p.murray-john@northeastern.edu.

Thanks! Hope to hear from you

Patrick

[Patrick Murray-John]

Thanks, Hannah, for putting this together. I hope the many Omeka users and hackers in NYC will contribute!

I’m working on some guides toward what the Omeka community has said they want more of. It’ll be up and ready on Monday.

Any level of Omeka hacking/theming/coding is great for contributing. You’ll solidify what you’ve already learned, and help others discover what’s possible.

Dr. Patrick Murray-John
Omeka Director of Developer Outreach

[Patrick Murray-John]

The Omeka forums might be a good place to ask, if you haven’t already. Others out there with Neatline experience might point you in the right direction.

[Patrick Murray-John]

Hi Christopher,

If you haven’t already, you might float out a request on the Omeka designer/developer marketplace forum.

I’d say it’ll also help to define a sense of what kinds of building / customization you anticipate. Much can be done via the admin UI and shortcodes. Theme tweaking and customization is a different story, and customized behaviors via plugins are yet another.

In general, a good starting point for knowing what you need Omeka to do and what customization might be called for is to figure out, for your corpus, what defines an “Item” in Omeka, and whether the user interactions you want are available out of the box. Then, there’s looking at the existing plugins to see if they get what you need.

The other thing is whether you want a custom theme, or can make little tweaks to an existing theme that gets the job done for you.

Hope that helps,
Patrickc

[Patrick Murray-John]

Ah! Excellent! Your update came just as I was typing a reply that the process of sending out the 17,000+ emails was still running, so it was likely just waiting for it’s place in the queue!

[Patrick Murray-John]

As of right now, I think you can ask them to turn on the export plugin by contacting them via the contact form. However, the CSV that generates only includes Item metadata and files.

If you can wait a few weeks, though, Omeka.net will be updated to the latest version of Omeka, which includes API access. There is a separate Omeka plugin that you could put in your new standalone site, and it will suck much more data from the omeka.net site via the API.

In both cases, none of the theme configuration gets exported, so those would need to be rebuilt.

[Patrick Murray-John]

If the past upgrade experience was something big like 1.x to 2.x, there is much less to worry about in 2.1.3 to 2.2.2. It won’t break themes or plugins, for example.

You could look through the plugin to see how it works. Most of the guts are in the views folder, so you could probably copy a lot of that.

[Patrick Murray-John]

If you use the latest and greatest Omeka (version 2.2.2), the shortcode carousel plugin will let you add that with a shortcode in a simple page, and you can then make that your homepage in the navigation settings. Most other parts of Omeka homepages can also be built with the various other shortcodes.

If you’ve built up your homepage directly in the theme’s index.php file, you can invoke shortcodes directly via PHP.

[Patrick Murray-John]

Dagmar,

Regarding Omeka and preservation, I see two different levels: preservation proper — including things like checksums on files and maintaining that integrity, confirming sameness of two different files, etc. — and backup management. From what I gather, different groups or institutions have a variety of levels of need between those.

I can say that Omeka will probably not be doing the kinds of deep preservation that a DAMS would do — we’ll always focus on the publishing, but will be moving toward better interaction with other tools that do that level of preservation (some folks at Rice are working on a plugin to connect to DSpace, for example).

The more basic level of maintaining backups of a site, however, seems closer in line with Omeka’s mission of publishing — publishing without easy backups of a site isn’t a very good practice! That also reminds me of the conversation we had about IT needs, in particular what (I think) Jen said about the time eaten up by doing these kinds of maintenance tasks. It’s probably not within scope of our current grants, but I can imagine a plugin that would dump the db, zip up all the file assets, clean out and/or back up the log files, and save it all to one location. That might get at some of the needs in the thread you linked to.

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