Difference between Media and Item

Hello!

I would like to add items describing authors and add an HTML biography to each item. I also need to be able to search in biography contents.

I think I have 2 main possibilities:

  1. Create a Media containing the biography and linked it to the item. So I should create a module to allow search tool to work in media content.
  2. Add the biography as an item property. So I should create a module to add an ‘HTML’ data type.

What is the best?

A problem with media is they are not semantically linked to items. Media should probably be added as a value of a property.
For example, we could add foaf:depiction property with a media (e.g. picture of a person) as value.

Those are really good questions, that I don’t think we’ve fully thought through yet.

With the addition of the HTML media type, we’d hoped to avoid using metadata for the web page display. That leans toward your first option, but with the expense you note of needing to add search.

I’m not sure what existing property would rightly be a biography value. So, I’m leaning a bit toward your option 1, unless there’s some other vocabulary that handles biography well.

For foaf:depiction, though, that sounds like Omeka S could handle that well enough as a URI value for that property, though where to put that image, and whether Omeka S should have a mechanism for uploading it, are also good questions.

Thank you for your answer.

Right, but sometimes HTML belongs to metadata (e.g. bio:biography). In fact, not a problem for me: biographies are meta external content and can be managed as attached media.

However, I also have to add historical letters (scans and transcriptions). I probably should create an item and attach the scan as a medium. Where should I specify metadata (sender, recipient, date…)? In item or in medium?

I think media metadata should only describe the medium and not the content (picture resolution, scan date…), am I right?

Admin interface should probably let manage media in the same way as item sets. This would also enable to add the same medium to several items.

I agree about the media metadata being specific to the media, as distinct from the Item. However, this often comes up in Omeka Classic, too, and sometimes people make the distinction but more often do not. I’ll be interested to see if the media metadata gets more use in Omeka S.

Regarding managing media, I think we’ll have to see how broad the need for that turns out to be. The most common need for uploading image assets is for theme logos, which we’ve handled. Not sure how many other properties this might be needed for.