I am currently working on my thesis, which involves creating a digital representation of my university using Omeka S. My goal is to build a structured and well-organized site that can showcase university-related content such as historical archives, research materials, faculty contributions, and student projects. Is any example of what should add in omeka s site?
Since I am relatively new to Omeka S, I would appreciate some guidance on the best way to structure my site. Here are a few key questions I have:
What is the best approach to structuring the site? With items and exhibits. I dont understand it very well. Should I create separate sites within Omeka S for different faculties or use item sets to categorize content?
How should I configure metadata to ensure proper organization and searchability of items?
I would love to hear any advice, best practices, or examples from similar projects. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Doing one site or multiple sites depends on University policy. For example:
The Ecole de Sciences Po Paris has a single site which combines archives, documents produced by teachers, heritage documents and theses. The point is to have a single entry point, a single showcase for the digital library (https://bibnum.sciencespo.fr/s/catalogue/page/accueil) .
Paris Saclay University has as many sites as services because the sites are not aimed at the same audience at all (https://numaclay.universite-paris-saclay.fr/s/numaclay/page/accueil).
-The University of Lille has chosen to completely separate its heritage content and content intended for students in two Omeka S because the teams and working methods are different (Accueil · Lillonum · Omekas and Accueil · Ioké.
There is no right or wrong choice, but we must take into account the corpus of documents, the people who contribute, the funding organizations/labs for example.
Concerning metadata, it is important to standardize them in order to facilitate cataloging and make searching efficient, regardless of the choice of the number of sites. However, it is necessary to know what types of documents will be on Omeka S and what audience it is intended for. Standardization involves the choice of vocabularies and the creation of resource models. The use of certain plugins is recommended, such as Value Suggest (Omeka S - Value Suggest).
I hope I was able to help you, good luck with your thesis !