Oral History Metadata Synchronizer

[hbidz...@gmail.com]

Hi All
I was wondering if anyone has tried to integrate OHMS (University of Kentucky: http://nunncenter.org/ohms-info/) into their use of AtoM to describe and make accessible oral history?
Heather

[Dan Gillean]

Hi Heather,

Thanks for bringing this interesting project to my attention! Thus far no one has approached Artefactual about developing such an integration - that's not to say that someone in the community hasn't attempted it themselves!

I could definitely see a strong use case for such an integration. I found the following information in the article on OHMS printed in Oxford's Oral History Review (here) particularly interesting:

Most importantly, with the assistance of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Nunn Center is currently preparing OHMS for free open-source distribution. As part of this initiative, OHMS is being developed as a plug-in, working seamlessly with other content management systems, including Omeka, Kora, CONTENTdm, and Drupal. OHMS was initially created in an archival context to serve an archival access imperative, yet its potential uses extend far beyond the archives. This case study reflects on the history of OHMS as it enters into a new phase designed for public consumption.

The fact that the software will be open-source, and that other integrations have already successfully taken place, is a positive sign for the possibility of future integration with AtoM.

As you may know, Artefactual's business model is based on community-driven development - sometimes our approach is referred to as the "bounty model". In essence, we release all our code for free, we maintain free documentation, and free user support via our forum. We are able to do this by offering value-added services, such as hosting, data migration, training, theming - and custom development. Whenever we work with members of our community as clients, part of our agreement is that contracted developments will be included in a future public release, so that every time one institution supports feature development, the entire community benefits.

We do what we can to tackle bugs and minor features ourselves when preparing public releases, but as a small company, we can't take on larger development projects without support from a sponsoring institution. So while we at Artefactual would agree that this integration could be extremely useful for our community, it is unlikely to be done by us without client support!

As our code is open-source, anyone is welcome to customize the application themselves - so anyone with development skills, or access to developers, could perform this integration work. In that case, we always encourage developers to consider contributing code back to AtoM - that way, if it is incorporated into a future public release, Artefactual will maintain the code going forward, thereby reducing the maintenance burden for developers and institutions as AtoM continues to evolve and develop.

If you or your institution are interested in having Artefactual prepare an OHMS integration quote, please feel free to contact me off-list. If you have the ability to develop it yourself, keep posting in the user forum, and our developers will lend whatever guidance and support they can!

Kind regards, 

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Product Manager / Systems Analyst,
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056

@accesstomemory

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[Dan Gillean]

FYI for those interested in this thread, the article I pulled the quote from can be found here:
http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/03/20/ohr.oht031.full?keytype=ref&ijkey=CvecnLmfvHTndIThttp://

I found it via this article on the University of Kentucky's Louis B. Nunn's Center for Oral History site: http://nunncenter.org/nunn-centers-ohms-system-featured-in-article/

Cheers,

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Product Manager / Systems Analyst,
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056

@accesstomemory