Deciding to put something up on your bedroom wall is a semi-permanent declaration of your appreciation or affiliation with whatever the item represents. Continue reading “Curator and Visitor”
Project 3 stretched our experiences with content management systems this semester and let us create our own metadata schemes and taxonomy for 24 items of our choosing. I chose to use Omeka and a new system, StoryMaps js to document my apartment’s tea collection. Continue reading “Project 3 Final Thoughts”
This time in class we moved on from one content management system to another. We put down our experimenting with Omeka and jumped into Timeline JS. So far, my experience with Timeline JS has been mostly painless and actually quite fun. Timeline JS has been an easy, open source way to display content chronologically, something that (to my knowledge) I can’t do in Omeka, even if just because I don’t have the knowledge on how to do it. Continue reading “Continuing the Digital Adventure”
I definitely prefer using TimelineJS to the Omeka site. It’s not as clunky in regards to adding images and items, however, media insertion is kind of difficult (if you don’t know what you’re doing, like me). If the images are from a different source other than the Omeka links that we are using, the image is weirdly centered. I don’t know how to fix this so I just gave up on it. However, I do prefer TimelineJS because there are more ways to customize it, such as font styles and colors (via hex codes). Project 3 is open-ended, and I’m considering doing a timeline of all of my tickets (such as plane, admission, and concert tickets).
The move to digital has been fairly easy because we had all of our information prepared beforehand. Omeka is a very easy platform to use, and the tutorial we got from Rebekah Walker was very straightforward. Having our metadata prepared before we completed the physical aspect of this project was very useful; it made transferring the content to Omeka really easy. Being able to upload our content into a digital exhibit is great because our hard work will be accessible for a broader audience. Participating in the planning and execution of these two types of exhibitions has been a great experience so far. I am excited to see how our digital exhibits turn out.
As one era ends, a new one begins. And while the end of creating the physical exhibit has passed, it has marked the beginning of the next part, perhaps the most applicable to my major: the creation of the digital exhibit.
So far, my ease into the digital space has been relatively painless, disregarding a few hiccups. Omeka is something that has been referenced by DHSS peers many times, but I haven’t had the opportunity to use until now. Upon using it, I see why my peers like it so much and want to use it for their capstone projects. Omeka is a fairly painless program to use, and is so open and customizable. The input so far has been easy to understand, and the other aspects of it seem simple enough as well. And while I have not used many functions of Omeka yet, I have seen what it is capable of and I am eager to try these other things out and make my exhibit my own!
I also look forward to creating the timeline, though I dread it at the same time. I think of timeline-based information to be some of the most interesting to read and learn about and am excited to apply that to my exhibit. However, many of my items do not have a date, and are hard to even guess a date for as they could be from any time within their context, such as the Nathaniel Rochester Society invitation, which could be from any time after 1967. Generally speaking I do look forward to what’s ahead though!
I’m pleased to report that my migration into the digital space has thus far been relatively painless. Though my ego would like to say that the ease of the transition was due solely to my own technological prowess, the truth is that I do have some past experience with Omeka. A very patient grad student taught me the mysteries of its use last semester in Rochester Reformers (HIST.340).
With the completion of the physical Ellingson exhibit came the near immediate transfer back to the classroom and start of a project to move everything from the physical into the digital.
It was a new experience, as anything related to the class is. The long process of digging through archive, formulating a story, creating labels, and the organizing into a case was over, but so was the most arduous process of any exhibit creation. The sheer amount of time spent in the Archive, obsessing minutely over the most tiny detail of the title, date, description, and source came to fruition. With all items chosen, labels made, and metadata waiting to be formatted, the first move to the digital space was seamless.
Omeka is an open source content management system for online digital collections, and makes the process of inputting information as easy as possible. It allowed for the easy creation of a collection titled ‘Mark Ellingson’, which then acted as a common link for all the items in the physical case. Each item needed an image, a label, and metadata, but fortunately, all of this came with the creation of the physical exhibit and creating six separate items was as easy as copying and pasting from a spreadsheet. With properly named files, images of the items were added, and the Mark Ellingson collection of the RIT Museum Studies Omeka page was created.
RIT Museum Studies 