Omeka File level metadata

Omeka Classic Troubleshooting
1

We are having a problem with omeka metadata that I’m hoping someone has a solution for.

When you upload items to our omeka instance as text, Omeka seems to create skeletal file-level metadata containing only technical information about the file and the text capture. This is problematic because search results screens get swamped with file records that show nothing more than technical metadata and the text capture, which is incomprehensible to our users. for en example of this behavior, see here:

http://52.34.117.234/omeka/search?query=rat+fink&submit_search=Search

The names of the items are incomprehensible and the file view has no metadata telling you what item they are related to, or any link back to the item. This is not workable for end-users, they have no idea what they are looking at and no way to get at information that might help them interpret what they are seeing.

What I want is for file level records to display dublin core metadata from the item level, but I see no automatic way to force omeka to do this. I’m pretty sure I can force the database to copy the relevant data from the item to file level with scripts and SQL queries, but I’d rather not go down that road if I don’t have to. Is there any other solution to this? Maybe a plugin? Can we make the theme display this data? How?

Thanks for any help!

2

The main box searches anywhere in metadata of collections, items and files. This is a particularity of Omeka, not often used: files can have metadata and that is useful when multiple files are attached to an item. Here, the pdf text is saved at file level, because there can be multiple pdf. So, move the text at item level if there is only one file and the search will work fine.

3

Hmmm. That is only a partial solution-we still have the problem of items with multiple files having entries in the search results that are unintelligible. And to do that for the hundreds of items we are likely to have, I’ll still need some kind of automated process to update the database directly-which is what I’m trying to avoid. Is there a way to tell Omeka to load the text capture at the item level on ingest? That would be ideal. We are using the CSV import plugin to ingest most of our materials.

It is good to know we can move metadata to the item level-that may come in handy.

4

So you can write some code inside the plugin PdfText to save the text(s) in an element (original text) at item level, it will be a clean solution.