A presentation to the PLVN Digital Content Seminar on Wednesday the 26th of March, 2014. Tom Edwards - Coordinator, Library Systems Technology at Wyndham City Libraries shares his experience with implementing the Omeka CMS for a local history website project (www.wyndhamhistory.net.au)

1. Omeka
Adventures with a local history portal
Tom Edwards

2. ● The Wyndham History project
● Digital history platforms
● OAI-PMH rant
● Why Omeka?
● A tour of features
● Our Omeka launch
● Questions
What we’ll cover

3. The Wyndham History project
Two year project, commissioned by Wyndham City to celebrate 150 years
since Wyndham was proclaimed a Shire.
Project included a book ($30 - buy one today!) and a website.
+

4. Some platforms...
ContentDM

5. No matter which you choose...
… Make sure they will play nicely with
eg. make sure they can be harvested
as an OAI-PMH repository.

6. An illustration...
Wyndhamhistory.net.au
Built using Omeka CMS
Trove.nla.gov.au
Weekly OAI-PMH harvest

7. An illustration...

8. An illustration...

9. An illustration...
http://re.cs.uct.ac.za/

10. An illustration...

11. http://goo.gl/Yfys9T

12. Why ?
● OAI-PMH repository
● Emphasis on end user-generated content
(although more on this shortly...)
● Great map support
● Supports responsive designs
● Open source and built on standard
Apache/PHP/MySQL with Zend framework
● Good user community and well supported
with plugins

13. User generated content
eg.
http://hurricanearchive.org/
Not yet available in the current version of
Omeka (2.1.1) however...

16. Great map support
eg.
http://neatline.org/neatline-in-
action/
Need pretty good bandwidth to showcase to its
full potential

20. Responsive design

21. How we got ready for cataloguing
● Prepared a cataloguing policy based on
Dublin Core requirements, included:
○ construction of local thesaurus
○ creating controlled vocabularies on Omeka
where possible
● Mapped MARC fields (from existing historical
photos on catalogue) to Dublin Core
Elements, used:
○ MARCEdit (Export tab-delimited records)
○ CSV Import plugin on Omeka

22. A tough launch decision...
Omeka 1.5
(End user
contribution)
Omeka 2.x
(Responsive
design)

23. Our Omeka instance
Omeka 1.5
(End user
contribution)
Omeka 2.x
(Responsive
design)
● 441 published items (635 in total)
● 6 x digitized oral histories (MP3 files to
stream) - more to come
● Neatline map of Truganina State School
● Interactive timeline
● Flexible searching options
○ Keyword
○ Browse
○ Map-based
○ Advanced (boolean, additional filters etc.)

24. Omeka 1.5
(End user
contribution)
Omeka 2.x
(Responsive
design)

25. Omeka 1.5
(End user
contribution)
Omeka 2.x
(Responsive
design)

26. Omeka 1.5
(End user
contribution)
Omeka 2.x
(Responsive
design)

27. Omeka 1.5
(End user
contribution)
Omeka 2.x
(Responsive
design)

28. Omeka 1.5
(End user
contribution)
Omeka 2.x
(Responsive
design)

29. Omeka 1.5
(End user
contribution)
Omeka 2.x
(Responsive
design)

30. Omeka 1.5
(End user
contribution)
Omeka 2.x
(Responsive
design)

31. Omeka 1.5
(End user
contribution)
Omeka 2.x
(Responsive
design)

32. Omeka 1.5
(End user
contribution)
Omeka 2.x
(Responsive
design)

33. Omeka 1.5
(End user
contribution)
Omeka 2.x
(Responsive
design)

34. Onwards and upwards!
Omeka 1.5
(End user
contribution)
Omeka 2.x
(Responsive
design)
● CONTRIBUTION PLUGIN!
● Comprehensive, thoroughly researched
Werribee WW1 ANZAC exhibit to coincide
with centenary.
● More maps! including:
○ Original annotated shire surveyor maps
○ Charming hand-drawn maps of
pastoralist estates (to overlay on google
map layer?)
○ flora/fauna survey results of werribee

35. Omeka 1.5
(End user
contribution)
Omeka 2.x
(Responsive
design)
“Eric Davis, Alex Muir and Eliza Davis.,” Wyndham History, accessed March 18, 2014,
http://www.wyndhamhistory.net.au/items/show/1192.
Questions?