#omeka

Sign worn during the Masterson protest 

Last year, the Woodson submitted a proposal for the library’s Fondren Fellows program. We wanted someone to use our archives to tell the story of protesting at Rice University between April 1969 – April 1970 using an online exhibit. The students would specifically highlight the Masterson Crisis and the Abbie Hoffman incident / Allen Center occupation. These protests are uniquely Rice in nature, but also influenced by protest movements across college campuses.

Crowd protesting the Masterson appointment arriving in front of Lovett Hall on Saturday, February 22, 1969

For the past semester, our Fondren Fellow Emma Satterfield, has been hard at work tackling the Masterson Crisis. She spent many weeks reading through all of the William H. Masterson Controversy records, taking detailed notes, creating a thorough timeline, and understanding all of the important players. She met with Dr. Allen Matusow to discuss specifics with a historian who specialized in the time period, but also was there. Finally, she spent weeks creating the online exhibit. She selected photographs (digitizing new ones), fliers, Thresher articles, and KOWL audio, marrying all of this with a gripping narrative.

Whether you want to relive the action or learn about what happened for the first time, you should give it all a look and listen. Here’s the link.

Dive into the fascinating world of telephones through a curated collection that transcends time and technology. "The Telephone In Art" exhibition at the 195 Broadway Art Foundation unveils the profound impact of telephonic communication through captivating artworks. 🎨🔗

From the emotional resonance of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's "We’re in some strange country" to the nostalgic charm of Matthew Ostrowski's "Western Electric Nº 1," each piece tells a unique story about our enduring connection with telephones. 🌐🔊

Hello! My name is Alex and I’ll be taking over the reins for the Omeka training and community at Research Platform Services.

I am currently an honours student in the School of Culture and Communications exploring the relationship between paranoia and the culture wars in Australian media discourses. I’m also about to start working as a Digital Studio intern exploring children’s stories written by children.

Previously I have worked as a Students@Work intern using Omeka to bring to life archival materials about Sir Redmond Barry – the first chancellor of the University of Melbourne – as well as to develop research data management skills. Throughout my time as an undergrad at the university I have also gained experience with web scraping and social network analysis tools.I have also presented a ResPitch at the 2019 Research Bazaar as part of the ResGrants program. 

I’m looking forward to building the Omeka community at the university and running engaging training programs and meetups! 

Feel free to get in touch with me at [email protected].

i’m sure you never see a pod kit like this !

This time around, we tried a more informal chat, since our audience is mostly LIS and the article is some archives inside baseball.

So... I’M DONE AT LAST!!!

Now to the actually adding of an image. I have picked out about 250-275 images that I want to add to the exhibit so keep that in mind when I talk about all the steps it takes.

Firstly, I added images by collection. I had already picked out all the images I wanted to use from my hard drive and I searched all of those images for ‘Cook’. Cook images have a number after them (i.e.: Cook 319) so I wrote down all of the Cook numbers so I could go to the original images.

Once I had all the numbers, I went to the vault and proceeded to pull all of the original images, one-by-one, and take a picture of the metadata that was on the envelope with my phone to make sure I had all the available information before adding the image to the collection. 

As you can see, there are 4 parts to adding each image. I firstly added the Dublin Core information, the Item Type Metadata, and the file.

I typically added the image first.

Then I added the Item Type Metadata. When I pulled the originals, I also wrote down what type of material the item was. Most in the Cook collection are 5x7 glass plate negatives.

Then I went back to the beginning and added the Dublin Core metadata. Just like with the Collections, I don’t fill out every box. As you can see, for the title I used the collection number and the subject & description were the rest of the image title from the hard drive. The other data is the same for every image and I copied and pasted it from a notepad into the correct boxes. I then save the Item to ensure the site doesn’t freeze and I don’t loose the basic information before I write a more detailed description and tags (I learned from experience).

I then describe the image in detail and use that description to add the tags.

As you can see, each image takes a while to add. There were 60 Cook images and it look me 3-4 weeks just to add those images to the collection. Now I have to do the other 200+ images... :D

I wrote about adding an Exhibit and Pages last post. Let’s talk about one of the parts that come with adding Items. You could just add all the images to one collection but I took the time to add a Collection page for each of Keeneland Library’s actual image collections which took A LOT of time due to having to hand type up the collection descriptions that were previously typewritten. When you add a collection, you fill out a Dublin Core metadata element set.

I didn’t fill out all the information required because either I didn't have it or it didn’t relate, but it took a while, as I said, to find all the data needed and then type it up.

I added 10 of these collections to Omeka and then moved on to the actual adding of Items.