Migrating Omeka site to Drupal?

[hl...@colorado.edu]

A faculty member approached me about an oral history digital collection that she would ultimately like to host in Drupal, but the institution with the Drupal instance won't be ready to accept the collection for 12-18 months. She is looking for an interim platform for the digital collection/website and is considering Omeka. How easily can a collection be migrated from Omeka to Drupal? Do any tools exist to simplify/automate the process? What technical skills are required to do something like this? I don't have any first-hand experience with either platform, so any information/advice you can provide would be greatly appreciated. 

 

Thanks,

 

Holley Long

 

[Patrick Murray-John]

Holley,

A timely question!

We haven't yet discussed or publicized this much to Omeka devs, since
we're still ironing out details, but one way or another Omeka 2.1,
slated for late summer, will include an API for data transfer.

That's good, but doesn't entirely address the task -- there would still
be the need to build something in Drupal that can 1) read from the Omeka
API and 2) stuff the data into the structures of your Drupal instance.
Those are not small tasks, but they're not insurmountable either. It
would be something to start planning with your Drupal dev team early.

The thing with Drupal is that any Drupal instance can structure its data
differently. Omeka tries to keep to good metadata standards like Dublin
Core metadata on Items, but the upshot on the Drupal side will depend on
what's available there. The Bibliography module might be a helpful thing
to look into for that.

My first impression is that the technical skills would be those of
building a Drupal module to transfer the data. That's a bit fuzzy at
this stage since we're still developing the API, but in general terms
that'd be the first thing to investigate. There's also thinking about
the compatibility of structures between Omeka and Drupal. Omeka's
primary record type is the Item -- it has Dublin Core metadata (possibly
more, depending on Omeka plugins), files, and is possibly associated
with a single Collection.

It sounds like it is early stages, both for the API into an Omeka
instance and for the structures of your Drupal instance. And so it might
be helpful to anticipate this need if you want to go that route, and
plan ahead for where Dublin Core metadata fits into your Drupal system,
and keep in contact about developments on both our sides.

Hope that helps,
Patrick

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[Wilhelmina Randtke]

I am seconding that doing a Drupal build that can handle metadata like Omeka will be difficult.  Even for someone with a lot of Drupal background, this is tricky and time consuming. How much background do you have in Drupal?  If you have some, then you can make a listing of essential things for a digital library, and look at difficulty of implementing them in Drupal.

 

In order to handle the metadata for Dublin Core, and other libraryish tasks, Drupal has to be customized quite a bit.  I recommend against it, because it's too much customizing.  I assume someone else is doing the Drupal install.  If so, it's probably not someone with library training.  So, trying to explain to that person the requirements for a system to host the oral histories will be key for you.  Then work with them to find a solution, and present it to the prof.

 

One option that may work well is to install both Omeka and Drupal on the same server and site, but have the Omeka in a directory of the site.  Then, style both installs the same, and have the navigational menus appear the same across the sites and link to key areas in both.  Depending on what other content will be on the Drupal site, this could be a good way to take the best of both systems, by applying them to the use they fit best.  Changing the theme to Omeka and to Drupal, so changing the visual look, is pretty straightforward.

 

-Wilhelmina Randtke

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[hl...@colorado.edu]

Thanks, Patrick and Wilhelmina, for the feedback. Clearly, it wouldn't be a trivial undertaking and sounds like it would be best start and stick with one platform. It's good to know, though, that Omeka will be coming out with an API in v. 2.1.

 

Regards,

Holley