Interest Level in Omeka Plugin for the Data Transfer from Archivists Toolkit

[Nathan S]

Hi,

After recently taking a look at Omeka, a thought occurred to me.
Wouldn't be great if records from the Archivist's Toolkit, AT for
short, (http://www.archiviststoolkit.org/) could be published to an
Omeka instance. This would clearly seem to have value to institutions
that use the AT for cataloging work, but don't have an accessible
public publication platform.

Taking a quick look at the code needed to do this, it seems that it
would require an Omeka plugin, and an AT plugin. The Omeka plugin
would handle authentication, and metadata and/or files sent to it by
the AT plugin, then create the Omeka records (Collections, Items, and
Files). The AT plugin on the other hand would allow users to select
AT records to publish to Omeka. Ideally this can all be done with one-
click. Now, I saw that there is a plugin for importing EAD finding
aids already, however, this only allows transfer of one of the record
types in the AT, not other relevant ones (i.e. Accessions,
Assessments, and Digital Objects) which an institution may be willing
to publish.

So from my point of view, there is value in doing such a project;
however, there are few questions which I hope this group can help
answer.

1. What would be the general interest level be in this?Are there a lot
institutions that use both tools now, or could such a product drive
adoption of Omeka by folks currently using the AT?

2. Would there be interest in supporting this plugin on Omeka.net? I
can even imagine a plan which would host both the AT database also.

3. And most importantly, what are the options available to found
development/support of this work? Is there any small grants that
could be applied for, or would users be willing to pay for this
product.


Thanks for any feedback.

[Sharon M. Leon]

Hi Nathan,

Thanks for your inquiry about a connection between Omeka and AT.  I think that there could be significant interest in this on both sides of the equation. I imagine that it would be a good idea for you to check in with the folks who are working on the revisions of AT for the future ArchivesSpace application (http://www.archivesspace.org/). The Dev list would be of great help in the planning and testing of the plugins necessary to make this connection.

The question of Omeka.net is a little bit more complicated, since all of those plugins are adapted and maintained by the Omeka team. So our ability to implement it and support it , it would depend on the functionality of the plugins and the demand.

Similarly, we're not in the position to fund the development, but perhaps there are other institutions lurking that would? Librarians? Archivists? Would you be game?

Thanks,
Sharon

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___________________________________
Sharon M. Leon, Ph.D.
Director of Public Projects
 and Associate Professor
Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
George Mason University
4400 University Drive, MSN 1E7 Fairfax VA 22030

703-993-3831
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sharo...@gmail.com
<http://chnm.gmu.edu/>

[Nathan Stevens]

Hi Sharon,

Thanks for the info.  Adding support for ArchiveSpace would certainly be in the cards if there is sufficient interest (I am actually the person doing the data migrations work from AT to ArchiveSpace). 

In the mean time, I will continue to do some proof of principle work in my spare time.  So far the docs and API seem clear enough and all the functionality that would be needed seems there.
   

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[Sharon M. Leon]

Thanks, Nathan. I appreciate that.  And in the meantime, I'll try to scare up some people to join in. AT has such wide adoption, I think you're right about the appeal.
Take care,
Sharon

[ase...@vt.edu]

Hi Nathan,

This is exactly what I am struggling with right now! What I have so far is a several step process:

First, I have to create digital object records in AT at both the collection and item levels (AT only has DC export option for digital objects, no other type of record, grrr!).
Then I export DC XML records for those digital objects from AT.
Then I had a friend write me a small program in C# to normalize the DCXML records into CSV files with the correct formatting and mapping that I need.
Once CSV files are generated, I bring the item-level records into Omeka using the CSV Import plugin.

But the major snag I'm still stuck on is that there is no way to import collection-level metadata into Omeka. I suppose this has not been an issue for most institutions, but at my special collections, we have hundreds of manuscript collections with digitized content we want to display on Omeka, and because each of these collections has multiple items associated with them, it makes sense for us to try to maintain that hierarchical structure. We have a lot of metadata at the collection level we want to provide along with the items. We are using Omeka 2.0, therefore EAD importer is not an option.

What I'm wondering right now is how complicated it would be to modify the existing CSV Import plugin to include the option for importing at the collection level.

Needless to say, I really wish this project had gotten off the ground.

Thanks for any feedback.

-Adrienne

[Patrick Murray-John]

Adrienne,

The earlier parts of the thread are a little old, and things have changed considerably. Hopefully it will ease some of your pain.

If you upgrade to Omeka 2.1, you could ask your C# developer to make use of Omeka's new API (documentation here ). It should let the program send the DC data directly to Omeka, without the move to the CSV file and importer.

The API also allow you to create and edit collections in Omeka, so that might solve your collection-level data issue.

Hope that helps,
Patrick

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[Adrienne Serra]

Thanks! You've been a lot of help. Upgrading will be the next step in this saga. 

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Adrienne Serra

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Virginia Tech Special Collections
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