Omeka S team,
Our librarians would like to be able to easily duplicate items with a single click from the admin interface. While resource templates are a great way to speed up the manual creation of similar items, if you have items which have nearly identical metadata, as often happens, it may be easier to duplicate the item entirely, and simply change a field or two, and swap out the media.
Another possible usecase would be in situations where an item needs to appear on multiple sites, but with slightly different metadata. For instance, our institution has some correspondence between William Henry Seward (Secretary of state under Lincoln), and President Lincoln in our collection. Once our various Omeka S migration projects are completed, we will have these letters appearing in two different sites, one focusing on Lincoln, and one focusing on Seward. The professor researching Seward used different metadata standards for his project vs the metadata standards used by our rare materials librarians when they processed the materials for Lincoln that overlap with said professor’s research. If these projects were coming into Omeka as newly processed collections rather than being imported in bulk from where they are currently housed, this feature would be a massive time save.
Implementation could look like either an option under the “batch options” dropdown from the item page and search results pages within the admin interface, or a dedicated copy button; either inline on those screens, or next to the “Delete, cancel, save” buttons of the item edit screen. Ideally, a combination of the three for maximum usability.
If some of the code can be easily reused for this feature, it would be VERY nice to be able to one click copy sites as well, but I imagine the data model for sites are far more complicated than it is items. Usecase here being EITHER creating sites to be able to draft large scale changes without affecting sites that are currently live, or prototyping sites from templates. In our Omeka S rollout project, another, rather niche usecase would have benefited from this as well. Namely, we have created sample sites for each theme so that our librarians can preview them prior to selecting one for our frontend developer to use in building the site. I personally built those sample sites, and it was a bit aggravating to create the same site 9 times over, even if it was only 3 pages of copy-pasting (followed by fixing the same typo 9 times).