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 ...
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.
ReplyDeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteBasically I installed Apache, MySQL and php by hand, taking the defaults and did much the same with phpadmin.
ReplyDeleteI 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