I used to build solutions for digital asset management for people but now really only manage other people doing so.
However, today I had a need to get my hands dirty - someone wanted to have us host data but allow them to front end exhibition sites with Omeka.
Now I must admit that Omeka was no more than brochureware to me but after spending yesterday afternoon upgrading my linux laptop to Precise Pangolin aka Ubuntu 12.04 LTS I had a go at installing Omeka this morning.
Using the instructions on the Omeka website (which need a little tweaking for Pangolin) I had a running install on my laptop in around 20 minutes and a dummy collection of nineteenth century faux mediveal romantic paintings up and running in a further 10 complete with sensible looking metadata
As a test it's fairly trivial, but the power and ease of use is quite amazing - If I was running a local art gallery or museum and wanted an online exhibition this would be a complete no-brainer to install and use and just like doing your own ocr or digitisation programme well within the capabilities of a local art gallery or history research group ...
However, today I had a need to get my hands dirty - someone wanted to have us host data but allow them to front end exhibition sites with Omeka.
Now I must admit that Omeka was no more than brochureware to me but after spending yesterday afternoon upgrading my linux laptop to Precise Pangolin aka Ubuntu 12.04 LTS I had a go at installing Omeka this morning.
Using the instructions on the Omeka website (which need a little tweaking for Pangolin) I had a running install on my laptop in around 20 minutes and a dummy collection of nineteenth century faux mediveal romantic paintings up and running in a further 10 complete with sensible looking metadata
As a test it's fairly trivial, but the power and ease of use is quite amazing - If I was running a local art gallery or museum and wanted an online exhibition this would be a complete no-brainer to install and use and just like doing your own ocr or digitisation programme well within the capabilities of a local art gallery or history research group ...
3 comments:
I found Omeka easy to use as well. I knew a bit of HTML and CSS, but no PHP and I was able to set up a site for a class as well as tweak some of the graphics.
I did have a problem with the site not working sporadically. Every once and a while it would just stop letting me access the admin portion. Feel free to read my satirical letter to Omeka: http://joshinglibrarian.cixx6.com/2011/07/dear-omeka/.
I would love it if you would write more about the tweaks you had to do to make Omeka work with 12.04. I've been trying to set up a test install on a local LAMP server, but I haven't had any luck following the instructions on the Omeka site.
Basically I installed Apache, MySQL and php by hand, taking the defaults and did much the same with phpadmin.
I had some protection problems with the protections and since it was on my dev machine brute forced oth by a chmod 775 on the omeka directory and chmod -R 777 on the archives directory
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