[More live blogging from Gemma from the MCN 2010 conference, ‘I/O: The Museum Inside-Out/Outside-In’ in Austin, Texas, to help MCGers keep up with the news and exciting research being shared at the conference.]
Opensource 28/10
Omeka: open source for open museums? Sharon M. Leon
Omeka is an open source publishing platform, it is a CMS (content management system). Has flexible feeds so can export to other systems. Underneath is mysql and dublin core
Fully customisable with css and php knowledge.
They Analysed what types of pages users have built with omeka by google searching keywords and sending out surveys. People doing the most with omeka are in the library and archive world. These include digital collections, narrative exhibitions, journal sites.
Less adoption by museums but why?
Barriers: fwd thinking institutions already have other systems in place
Getting access to linux servers
Support not there, so you need a willingness to tinker.
Smaller institutions not comfortable with set up.
Launched today omeka.net hosted omeka site
Unlocking museum systems with open source – Richard Barrett -Small @richbs from V&A
V&A developers working with opensource to add new features to and enhance website.
Use opensource tools to talk to and release data from legacy systems. Search the collections site uses python and django. Use json api to website, mobile site and in-gallery kiosks. Sphinx is the opensource search engine they use.
A reason to use Opensource is to try things you might not have tried if you had to pay for it
One week, one tool: Effie Kapsalis anthologize.org
@digitaleffie
This was a week-long residential project billed as a digital humanities barn raising. They raised an open source tool
“Leadership is momentum building” ie after 15min discussion, where both options equal you just need to decide
Designed tool around programming skills the had in the team, they had a diversity of skills on one team
Tool they created is anthologize a wordpress plugin
Not impossible to implement some of this in our everyday work, eg cross skill teams
Q&As
With opensource as barriers go down, the advantages go up
MCN idea floated to create a resource of current projects or a who is working on what resource. So can work together and connect with other professionals.