We’re in the first stages of a project to make Omeka S available for Australian humanities researchers running on our national research cloud platform, Nectar, and I’m trying to understand the best way to manage the use case of multiple projects from different research teams.
I’d assumed that a single Omeka S instance would make sense, but it looks like this might not get the separation between research projects I’d been imagining and which the IsolatedSites plugin seems to be designed for.
The alternative - which we’re going with for some of our legacy collections - is running a separate instance of Omeka S for each collection behind an Apache as a load-balancer. The problem with this is that spinning up new projects will require more work than just starting a new project in an Omeka S instance.
Is there a middle ground, where we use Omeka S permissions to put a user’s items in an itemset which corresponds to a project?
Hi Mike,
I run 2 instances (soon to be 3) of omeka S, plus dev environments for my institution. We have lots of different users and teams, and looked for additional levels of segregation prior to the availability of the Isolated Sites plugin. If you’d like, we can sit down for a few and talk about our implementation over zoom, and the lessons we learned on the implementation project
I had not spotted the Isolated Sites module: I’m glad you mentioned it. When we started looking at this issue a year ago that module had not been released. Instead, we were experimenting with the Teams module by the University of Illinois. This has not been added to the Omeka S Modules page, but the code is in GitHub and is actively maintained with commits within the last couple of weeks. There is an article in Code4Lib about the development of the module and the design issues. You might like to consider the Teams module to see how it compares with Isolated Sites.
One thing which we have identified as a concern, if we were to use Omeka S for multiple research projects, is that the specialist vocabularies required for different projects could make the editing interface quite overwhelming for users. So I would be looking to adapt Isolated Sites or Teams, perhaps so that you can define for a site which vocabularies are allowed to be used.