During class on 2/28/12, our guest speaker was Bridger Dyson-Smith from the Hodges Library Digital Library Initiative. He spoke about options for digital platforms for online digital libraries. I'm sure not coincidentally, this is was our biggest hurdle for our project.
Although our syllabus recommended using Omeka, everything we found on the www.Omeka.com site led us to believe that we had to use a Linux operating system in order to utilize the software. Given that we all work on Macs and Windows, this presented itself as a pretty significant challenge. Clayton emailed Melanie and Bridger on 2/21/12. Bridger's initial response was that we needed to download a program called MAMP. Although my knowledge of anything related to website construction is pretty limited, from what I found on the MAMP website, it looked as though it was a sort of patch for a server issue, not a patch for using Mac instead of Linux. Bridger explained during his presentation to our class, however, that MAMP would help us with the Linux issue. I was willing to try it.
Thankfully, while Bridger was discussing our platform options, Troy Valos typed in our text chat that Omeka offered 500MB of free storage if you signed up for their basic package on www.Omeka.net. I immediately visited the site and found that is not only solved our Linux struggle but that the site would host our content on their own servers, allowing us to forego the issue we would have to face trying to find server space through UT to host the site. Later in the class, Elizabeth gave a presentation on Omeka, further clarifying that the free basic version would allow for small prototype collections such as our own. I signed up for a site and within a few minutes, facesoftenncare.omeka.net was born!
Our digital collection and all of the metadata exists in a word document. Our next step now is to figure out how to get it to live accurately on the website. I did a quick test run and uploaded a personal photo and found it to be extremely simple. Although we could upload each file individually with its own corresponding metadata, I know we want to try to utilize Omeka's ability to upload a .csv file of everything all at once. I am going to attempt to create that spreadsheet this weekend to see if that process really as simple as it presents itself to be.
Long story short: we have a site!!!
-Tara-
