I am a neighborhood historian who is considering obtaining grant funding to hire a freelance Omeka developer.
I need the developer to use the Omeka platform to re-create an online-only River Terrace History Scrapbook (see http://riverterracehistoryscrapbookdc.org) that was launched in September.
How much would such a project cost, at a minimum? As explained on the website, the Scrapbook is:
- An online-only collection of articles, photos, newsletters, and other memorabilia.
- Freely available to anyone who has access to a web browser, via the search feature or via clicking on one of the 12 categories.
- Scaleable; anyone can submit their River Terrace history for consideration – by the Scrapbook Administrator – to be added to the Scrapbook.
- Maintainable by the Scrapbook Administrator, a non-developer.
I do not need a custom theme; the one used for the Hurricane [Katrina] Digital Memory Bank, Centennial Memories [Bowling Green State University], http://www.cgpcommunitystories.org, or something similar, is fine. And the domain registration and the web hosting for the Scrapbook have already been paid for.
It’s always hard to estimate costs, but from what you describe the cost could actually be pretty low. Indeed, this is the kind of case that Omeka is designed to make low-cost.
First off, if at this stage you aren’t looking for theme development, that drops the cost significantly, though depending on the grant options available it might be worth building in some of that time, just in case.
Second, if the hosting costs are already taken care of, then there’s not much there, as long what you have fits the standard needs of a LAMP stack. Reclaim Hosting, among others, works well, and has an easy installation process. Other hosting companies might require more time to install Omeka.
The points you list off are almost all available in Omeka out of the box. For anyone submitting, you’ll just need to add the Contribution plugin.
Since you have lots of content already, it sounds, then, like the greatest expense will be the person-time of setting up the site and moving the content over. That shouldn’t be underestimated, but I can’t give a real firm cost estimate. Factors are: time to set up the site itself; time to move content over; wages for the people doing that work.
Short version: it doesn’t sound like much, if any, developer (as in coding) time. It’ll just be setting up the site itself, then moving content over.
Wondering what the current status of this project is - I am interested in helping with this migration and setup.