I know my semester would have been a lot easier if I had slapped a lot of stuff online. The images are fantastic, and it doesn’t take much to make something beautiful and edifying out of them. But I’ve played in that sandbox before. The last two days simply confirmed what I already know. I am a stubborn thorn in the side of every boss and project director in the world that just wants you to put a lot of stuff online so that they can get another grant or a bonus or whatever they think the goal is. I make my life a lot harder by continuing to ask questions and push my own understanding of the methods by which we create and maintain information in the digital realm. I’d like to believe that by asking the archivists and project directors present at this conference to think about controlled vocabularies and unified subject/keyword searching that the current International Portal will be that much better the next time they make it.

Until then, however, I just exert authority over my own tiny realm of data.

Please be patient with me as I make a responsible Omeka site.

I had hoped that a few folks in class would use Omeka for their final projects, as so many others have in past Clio II sessions. It’s hard not have anyone to bounce your ideas off of, or to talk to about how they are finding answers or work arounds to the many coding issues. So at this time, I would like to acknowledge former Clio II student Dave Colamaria. Dave crafted a beautiful website on the Steel Navy, and he has been a tremendous help to me as I try to make my way through customizing Omeka. It’s far from easy. Dave’s website is an example of what Omeka can do in the hands of the very talented.

Said helpful classmate also informs me that my blog posts are apparently too much reading, so they don’t “really get what I’m trying to do.” So I’ll say it again, for everyone else who does kindly read: Omeka is a content management system and online exhibition builder. Having already written about, worked at, and curated exhibitions on the Theresienstadt ghetto, it is my belief, based on nearly two decades of work on the subject, that the general public and the collections of the Terezin Memorial Archives and other related repositories are best served by having a website that provides discreet nuggets of information about particular events or people within the ghetto without the expectation of them spending more than a few minutes looking at the site. The internet is a smorgasbord; people nibble and discard rather than focusing their appetites on a main entree.

My site is not beautiful; it’s approaching functional. It is a difficult work in progress, particularly for someone like me, who had absolutely no experience before this with something like writing code. It is an intense frustration for a person with my background  to feel so ham handed and inadequate to the task. It is laborious to insert diacritical marks and translate everything from two languages. It is time consuming to scan and resize images. It is embarrassing to have something online with my name on it that “sucks.” But that’s the way Omeka works for me, is in the live environment. I don’t get a private sandbox to play in, so all the bumps and wrong turns are visible at all times to a visitor to the site.

There will be more content on there for Tuesday’s presentation, otherwise all this scanning will be for naught. But beautiful, well, I’m saving that for the bitter, bitter end.

Thanks to all of those who have provided helpful feedback over the course of the semester. It is much appreciated.

A few other thoughts went into the Omeka decision: in Clio I, when I asked Professor Cohen if I should be learning Dreamweaver, he told me no, that I’m already like an old emeritus curator, who’ll always be telling someone else what I want a database to do or how I want a website to look and function. I was a little perplexed by his comment, but I realize more and more how true it is. On any given project, I’m not going to be paid to make the website (I may always be stuck building the database, though). But whether it’s a big project or a little project, I do want to understand what I can expect someone else to do. Most institutions have no other option than to use an off the shelf product like Omeka. The more I looked into Omeka, the more curious I became about the mishmash of systems that they’ve used to come up with it. It has elements of PHP and MySql thrown in there. And then the data entry to go with any file you create is built on Dublin Core (ew) basics, but you can only create meaningful metadata if you already know how to do so. It’s beginner friendly, in that it’s very easy to use, and get it working; it’s not beginner friendly enough, in that it doesn’t encourage you to do things properly. Plus, I work in the Center for History and New Media, and it’s their product. I thought it might be nice to really be able to speak intelligently about it.

I’m using Dreamhost for my website, which Sharon pointed out has a very handy “one click” install feature. It was a fast process. Really, the most difficult thing to figure out was that I had to go through Filezilla to load it properly. Once you’ve done that, it’s half the battle. One of the more frequent complaints I hear about Omeka from museum folk is that of design limitation. Here’s where I think a talent for coding comes in handy. I created a few sample pages to have for the design assignment, so that I could provide some sense beyond a single static page. Omeka has a CSS page for each separate element, say header, footer, caption, etc. So if you want to change those elements, and you’re comfortable with code, then you’re going to have a pretty easy time making something that looks like what you want it to. If you’re not good at code, you may be stuck with a design you’re not crazy about, but at least the images and the informational elements will be there in a cohesive structure. Metadata is entirely up to the skills and requirements of the person/institution creating it. Based on my limited experience thus far, Omeka is a better tool than I thought it would be.

Not too many people clicked the link to Whitney Anne Trettien’s website in last week’s post. I like her thesis site because it is an innovative approach. Is it ever going to be a top Google hit? I kind of doubt it. But what I like is that she programmed the entire thing herself. She didn’t use a template, she didn’t follow the five design rules she was given in a book or an aging frat boy. She had to figure out how to write the code to make it do what she wanted. She had a vision of what she wanted her thesis to be in the online environment, and she ran with it. And you either have the stamina and the interest to follow it through to the end, or you abandon it halfway. But in the interim, you’ve had an actual interactive web learning experience. And isn’t that better than some tatty paragraphs in a fancy font?

I love great design. I’ve taken hellacious bus rides to the bowels of Central Europe to find a Cubist housing development or a little known Hundertwasser. Multimillion dollar exhibitions should always be about great design, at least, because their content is inevitably compromised by an education department demanding that little Billy should be able to take the metro down to the Mall for a satisfying educational experience without mom and pops on board to help him with the big words or the scary pictures. Making our own websites costs us nothing but our own time and effort, and a chunk of change for a computer, software, and hosting. So if I’m busting my hump, I want to be satisfied with my product. I want it to be my vision, my creative investment, and if it’s a failure in terms of its attractiveness to the greatest common denominator, so be it. But isn’t this the time for experimentation and failure?

Let us be visionaries. Let us look to those working in time based media, perhaps, for inspiration, if Whitney isn’t doing it for you. But let us not, for the love of all that is holy, feel like we have to make the same damn websites over and over again.

That said, physical layout skills don’t necessarily translate to the web. The readings are an important starting point for everyone; while much of it may seem obvious, even those that have design skills need the reminder that the web is a different animal. For my final project, I’ve specifically chosen to avoid attempting to put a physical exhibition in the online environment. I’m interested in exploring, and taking advantage of, the way we use the web to design a website that goes beyond what we see on most museum websites at this time.

For those that are looking at more traditional methods of web design, such as transferring a paper/thesis to the online environment, I recommend storyboarding. Most people have trouble visualizing, even when it’s our own idea. Sit down with some blank paper and a box of crayons, and draw what you want your web pages to look like. It will also help when it comes time to actually make/change the website, as you’ll have had the opportunity to think about what you can and can’t do with CSS. I also would recommend exploring how some others have chosen to deal with their Master’s theses online, such as MIT’s Whitney Trettien.