This workshop was written by Stefano Morello and structured after Amanda French's Introduction to Omeka Lesson Plan.
Omeka is a free Content Management System (CMS) and a web publishing system built by and for scholars that is used by hundreds of archives, historical societies, libraries, museums, and individual researchers and teachers to create searchable online databases and scholarly online interpretations of their digital collections. If you have a digital collection of primary sources that you want to publish online in a scholarly way, you’ll want to consider Omeka. Omeka allows to describe the items according to archival standards, import and export that descriptive information from other systems, and to create as many interpretive online exhibits as you like from those items.
Through this workshop, we are going to create and populate a database with artifacts from B. Altman’s & Co., the department store that until January 1990 resided in the building that houses The CUNY Graduate Center since 2000. We are then going to create a sample exhibition that uses the items in our collections to tell the story of the store in the first two decades of the 1900s.
- Some knowledge of HTML/CSS is recommended but not required.
Stand-alone workshop developed for the 2019 Digital Research Institute curriculum. The workshop takes approximatelly three hours to teach.