How to bundle media files to 1 item/metadata entry?

Omeka S
1

Hi all,

i have a specific use case and after reading the manual i am not sure if omeka is suited for it. I want to use omeka as a movie archive. To this end i want to import multiple files to 1 omeka item, which represents my movie entry. The files are on my local machine and are in a specific movie preservation folder structure. The folder structure contains video, audio and metadata files. I want to upload them all in one go and map them to 1 item in omeka, so that only 1 omeka metadata entry exists for my movie entry.

I have seen there is a metadata extractor plugin that could be usefull for this task and a csv importer plugin to import multiple files. The problem i have encountered is that each row in the csv describes 1 file with its own metadata, but in my usecase i want to have 1 metadata entry for all files and map those files to 1 entity, the movie item.

So my goals are:

  • Import multiple files in one go and map them to 1 omeka item with 1 metadata entry
  • map my descriptive metadata fields to the items metadata fields

I hope i explained it properly. Is it possible to do this with omeka s?

2

You can import multiple files to one item in one go with CSV Import. If you don’t have metadata that’s specific to each file, then it’s just a matter of doing an Item import and selecting the “Media source” mapping for the column with the file info and marking it “multivalue”: then you can have several URLs,filenames,etc. in the column that will all be mapped to one item. Any metadata you include on that line will be applied to the item.

There’s a setting for “multivalue separator” when doing the import, which sets the character you’d use in your column to separate between the multiple filenames (say, a semicolon or the pipe | character), and you just need to make sure the import is configured to use the same multivalue separator as your data in the CSV uses.