Hi from Scalar! Should we Omeka or Omeka S?

[Craig Dietrich]

Hi all,

Greetings from the Scalar team!  As you may know, Scalar features technical bridges to archives (and archival systems) such that authors can search those archives from within Scalar and import media and its metadata with just a couple clicks. That media and its metadata is then available to be used by the author in Scalar pages, annotations, etc.

We're presently working on a large project involving the entire workflow -- from archives to authoring in Scalar to release by the press -- and one of our partners has created an Omeka install for us on their servers, which will be one of a small handful of primary archives being used by the project authors.  A question has come up whether we should really be using Omeka S instead of Omeka?

From a technical perspective it has been suggested that Omeka S and Omeka offer roughly the same end-user experience, so we could stay with Omeka without "missing" features.  From a non-technical standpoint, the team is wondering if we should be investing in Omeka S as this will be a long term project and migration might be needed down the road.  I don't know enough about Omeka S to be able to offer a good answer on either question.

Curious if you could offer some advice?  Should we continue with Omeka or have our partner upgrade us to Omeka S?

Thanks!!

Craig

[Sharon M. Leon]

Hi Craig,

Thanks for checking in with this question. It's actually a really common one. There are big differences between Omeka Classic and Omeka S technically -- beyond the one site of Classic and the potential many sites of S. You might take a look at the tours for each (Omeka Classic: https://vimeo.com/55973380 Omeka S: https://vimeo.com/188656162). They both allow users to build nice exhibits and display sets of materials, but they function very differently.

While Omeka Classic has Dublin Core baked in as it's metadata schema, Omeka S is all linked data underneath and users can import any LOD vocabulary to combine with other LOD Vocabs to create resource description templates. That means Omeka S offers a much more flexible description system. You can check this out in the sandbox site: http://omeka.org/s/

Both versions have a stable API that provides access to all resources and data, so that won't be a problem on the Scalar import end.
(Omeka Classic API Documentation: http://omeka.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Reference/api/index.html Omeka S API Documentation: https://github.com/omeka/omeka-s-developer/blob/develop/docs/key_concepts/api.md)

Finally, there is an Omeka API Import module that will allow users to move materials from an Omeka Classic installation to Omeka S, so no matter what decision you make, you won't be stuck with it.

Hope that helps.
Sharon