Omeka
Since March 2019, Swansea University’s Digital Humanities team, in partnership with Special Collections and individuals from the College of Arts and Humanities (COAH), has been developing ‘Omeka S’ as a platform for our online collections and projects.
Omeka S describes itself as “a next-generation web publishing platform for institutions interested in connecting digital cultural heritage collections with other resources online” - essentially, it is a content management system designed specifically for showcasing archival/heritage projects (https://omeka.org/s/).
Our efforts with Omeka have concentrated in several key projects. The most developed of these is the Swansea Centenary 2020 site. The site serves as a point of convergence for activity around the University’s Centenary year, including a curated collection of essays from alumni and friends of the University, a full set of searchable PDFs of Inaugural Professorial Lectures dating as far back as the 1930s, and scans of other historically interesting documents, such as annual Council Reports and Percy Gleaves’ detailed portrait of the laying of Swansea’s foundation stone in 1920.
An advantage of Omeka is, as a service aimed at archives, it can hold large amounts of metadata for each digital item, with the user pulling as many or as few fields as desired from established ontological systems such as Dublin Core and Friend of a Friend, making it easy to give service users as much information as possible.
We are using Omeka for several projects within the University, such as The Dillwyn Papers, an archive of the written correspondence of an influential Swansea industrial family, and the History of Computing Collection, a significant museum collection based at the University.
Omeka is not simply being used for University work, however: as a team, we are committed to supporting the wider community and enabling development for local archives and projects. It is our aim to become a trusted technical partner, able to provide digital and archival assistance as well as continuity for community projects which often face challenges such and changing personnel and differing skill sets. To this end, we are building an online home for the work of notable Swansea photographer Bernard Mitchell, and working closely with St Helen’s Archive to showcase their archival holdings on a dedicated website.
These sites, as well as displaying photographs of artefacts or scans of documents, can also function as standard web pages, holding text and images to convey information or tell stories depending on the needs of each project. Our involvement with these community projects is not limited to online hosting and support, and the DH team offers training to our clients and stakeholders in order to empower them to own and develop their projects alongside us.
Examples of the flexibility of Omeka as a platform can be found here: https://omeka.org/classic/showcase/ and the Digital Humanities team can be contacted with any enquiries at DigitalHumanities@swansea.ac.uk.