I was asked today whether we could “clone” our Omeka classic site for offline use. Essentially, there are records to be added at a future date but for various reasons should not be available online (security and possibly copyright reasons). It seems to be that this isn’t really feasible short of setting up an internal server (which would still need its own IP, right?). If someone could confirm or suggest something different, I’m all-ears. The other alternative is no Omeka site for the scanned items, possibly ever, and coming up with some kind of offline option not involving an IP at all.
You could maybe add the metadata record for each item but instead of uploading the file, dedicate a field for explaining where to find it offline for users that have access. You could even make that field visible only to logged in users or users visiting from a specific set of IP addresses.
Depending on how the offline files are stored, you might even be able to link to them for users who have authenticated access via an intranet or something.
$file_id = 'secret.pdf';
if(current_user()){
echo 'View File: <a href="/path/to/intranet/files/'.$file_id.'">'.$file_id.'</a> (login required)';
}else{
echo 'This file is available in physical storage ('.$file_id.').';
}
Thanks, this might actually be useful for existing records in some cases… but I think the main issue is that the project team wants to be able to still browse through the files in one place and they like having everything centrally in Omeka (metadata plus files), and since they’re familiar with the GUI in Omeka admin then that’d be ideal. In other words, they wouldn’t want to have an offline folder of files to sift through but rather want to be able to see the file (and the Item Type Metadata text since we usually have an OCR’ed version of text in there as well) to show up when the record’s metadata is called up.
Basically, think of it like a traditional archive or library in which a researcher visits and can see all the local files on a particular computer, or locally networked computers, but the files aren’t available anywhere online. I’m not really sure if this is possible with Omeka.
If you start with the local installation (making that main instance), you should just be able to copy the database for use in the live installation but not copy the files folder. You might have to do some futzing with thumbnail replacements etc. for aesthetic reasons, but that shouldn’t be too hard.