Estimated time to complete this section: 80 minutes
1.4 Readings
Omeka provides a platform for presenting answers to historical questions. Those presentations are created using a plugin called Exhibit Builder, a name that reflects Omeka’s origins as a tool for archives and museums. The name highlights that Omeka presentations are designed to feature items. An exhibit consists of pages, each of which is made up of blocks that can take four forms: text, items and text, galleries of items, or a single large-scale display of an item’s media. You can also embed content in an Omeka page created in other web-based platforms, including timelines created in TimelineJS (coming up in Module 5).
A Resource page features a range of examples of digital local history sites built with Omeka, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Reviewing examples of other projects will help you understand what your own project could look like – although the examples are generally much larger in scale than what you will create. These sample projects also provide the opportunity to start thinking about the elements of an effective digital local history site.
Look briefly at each of the examples in the groups labeled Omeka.net sites and Omeka Sites before moving on to the activity. (The Resource page also includes two additional groups of examples that you do not need to review for this activity: those labeled Collection-only Sites and Aspirational Sites, which make use of plugins that are not available in the Omeka.net trial plan).
Activity 1.4: Review examples of Omeka sites
From the sites you examined, choose one (1) from the lists labeled Omeka.net sites and Omeka Sites, and answer the following questions:
- What is the topic and purpose of this site?
- Can you find an about page? What does it tell you? What doesn’t it tell you?
- What is the content of the site – what kinds of material does it contain?
- How is the content organized?
- What kind of sources does it use?
- How does it describe those sources (What metadata standard and which fields does it use? What information is provided in those fields? How consistent is it?)
- What question(s) does this pose and/or answer?
- How does it use historical sources to pose and/or answer questions? How much context does it provide for the sources it presents?
- How are the site’s exhibits organized? Are the pages easy to read? Is each page an appropriate length – was there an overwhelming amount of text? Did you scroll all the way to the bottom of each page?
- How effective are the answers the site offers to the questions it poses?
- Based on this example, what makes for an effective Omeka digital local history site?