Last year’s THATCamp featured a wonderful hands on workshop on how to use Omeka, an open source content management system that also functions as a digital exhibit publisher. Based on the success of this workshop, we’ve decided to run it again. So on Friday, from 1-2:30 in a room TBD, I (Chris Cantwell) will be leading a workshop introducing everyone to the basics of using Omeka both for research and teaching. I’m posting the abstract from last year’s workshop, which was run by Amanda French.

These days, any scholar or organization is almost certain to have a collection of digital material from research and teaching: scanned texts, digital images, original syllabi, even historic songs, oral histories, or digital video. Omeka is a simple, free system built by and for scholars and cultural heritage professionals that will help you publish and interpret such digital material online in a scholarly way so that it’s available for researchers, students, and the public in a searchable online database integrated with attractive online essays and exhibits. In this introduction to Omeka, we’ll look at a few of the many examples of Omeka websites built by archives, libraries, museums, and individual scholars and teachers; define some key terms and concepts related to Omeka; learn about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects; and go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka at omeka.net and the self-hosted version of Omeka at omeka.org. Participants will also learn to use Omeka themselves through hands-on exercises, so please *bring a laptop* (not an iPad). Learn more about Omeka at omeka.org and omeka.net.