Splinters Interactive Theatre Archive

Omeka S is an open-source web publication system designed for collecting institutions. It is designed to create a local network of independently curated exhibits sharing a collaboratively built pool of items and their metadata, although this installation is only being used for one pool of items.

 

A major feature and attraction of Omeka S is its powerful built-in metadata tools that enable researchers and collection managers to design the layout of metadata fields as suits their collections and to add metadata using standard ontologies such as Dublin Core. When published the website contents are readable by bibliographic web tools, and therefore discoverable and searchable by other researchers. Contents can also be shared and embedded on other sites.

 

The main components of an Omeka S collection are:

Items are objects with associated metadata, which are the building blocks of the collection. They can be uploaded, embedded from online sources, or imported from other collections using tools such as Zotero. Omeka S includes pre-defined Item Types called Classes, suitable for cultural heritage collections.

 

In Omeka S, Item Sets are an aggregation of Items to help organise the collection. An Item can belong to multiple Item Sets.

 

Media are digital media files such as video and image files. These can be digitised versions of physical objects, or born-digital objects. In this collection, digitised versions of physical objects, including digitised versions of analog video, are classified as objects in their own right. Media files must be described as an Item before they can be added to Omeka S.

 

A defined type of metadata used to describe a facet of an Item.

 

Vocabularies are collections of published RDF metadata Classes and Properties for describing Resources. Omeka also has a module called Custom Vocab that allows the creation of controlled vocabulary lists for a Property in a Resource Template. This is used to provided further levels of classification by making the user entering data to select from a defined list when entering metadata.

 

A set of pre-defined Properties for different Item Types, optionally with a Class to guide Item creation and the interpretation of Properties.