Wednesday - Conference Day One
This morning I attend a workshop on the content management system Drupal. It was a very interesting session. Drupal is an open source system, somewhat similar to Omeka, but seems to be farther along in its development. Quite an array of plug-ins have been written for this, and the examples of online exhibits we looked at this morning looked cool, worked well, and seem manageable. See an example here: To Live Forever
I had a follow-up conversation with a fellow attendee (from NY Public Library) who has had experience with both Omeka and Drupal; his thoughts about it were that Omeka is great for small organizations or specific projects, but that Drupal many be a better fit for more elaborate undertakings. It seems to me that it might be worth investigating both systems further.
Now I'm off to join an open storage tour at the Luce Foundation Center at the Museum of American Art; more later.
posted by bookgirl @ 2:06 PM
3 Comments:
I'm looking forward to hearing more about Drupal. The link you sent is pretty interesting. Enjoy D.C.!
I confess I'm not entirely clear about the difference between Drupal and Omeka - my impression was that Drupal was more of a web content mgmt application, so a much broader range of functions than Omeka. I guess that would also make Drupal more of a job for the IT staff. My hopes, of course, are that Omeka enables the non-IT staff ...
Bob and Lori both correct.
Drupal is a programming tool in the class of tools called content mgmt systems. It has a significant number of modules available to enable programmers to create a variety of web sites that perform transactions,e.g. ecommerce; do social media and accept user generated content, e.g. blogging, reviews, forums, polling, multimedia posting, etc.; and present static and dynamic content - which could be an online exhibit. It requires programming skills beyond the level of html to set up the sites. In the case of delivering an online exhibit, IT staff partner with museum staff to determine how the online exhibit will be designed and function, and then they'd program it into Drupal. Thereafter non-IT staff populate the content in the site.
We have a Drupal prototype under development. We're using it to convert the State Parks web site from the 1999-era web design to present day. We'll also add some discovery features. We're also exploring Drupal as a method to deliver GRN partner sites in their skins.
BTW: an interesting implementation of Drupal and SOLR is the ethicshare.org web site whose lead partner is the U of MN. Marj and I have been talking with these folks.
Omeka is a museum-content publishing system that enables organization to publish on-line exhibits, accept user-generated stories and possibly search archival collections. Omeka has pre-designed templates to make it easier for non-IT staff to create these types of web sites. Omeka requires IT staff to set-up and administer the Omeka installation(s) (i.e. make sure it is secure, content is backed up, and on-going updates are applied) so that non-IT staff can populate the content and interpret it.
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