Omeka Exhibit

Hi there! In this post I will be explaining how I made my own Omeka site and exhibit. I used the programming historian guide to help me with starting my site which can be found at: https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/up-and-running-with-omeka.

Week 1:

First I needed to create a site for myself so I logged into my Omeka site that I already established for the first Omeka project in week five. I named this site francescahist5891. The information that I will be adding to my Omeka site is going to be a log of artwork from the Kalamazoo Institute of Art located in Kalamazoo Michigan.

Once I got into my site I began changing the settings by adding plugins and looking at themes. I added COinS, Exhibit Builder, Library of Congress Suggest, and Simple Page as plugins. This was simple as all I needed to do was select Plugins from the top menu and click “install” on the four plugins I needed. I also went to the appearance tab at the top to look at the themes. I have the free version of Omeka so I only had two options and I decided to keep it to the default theme setting.

Next I wanted to add items to my site, to do this I selected “Items” from the side tabs and clicked “Add an Item”.

Once I did this it took me to the Dublin Core page to fill out for my first item. I went down the page and filled out the various items and then moved on to the metadata tab, the file tab, and lastly the tags tab.

I was then finished with adding my first item to my own Omeka site!

This was all familiar to me because in the first Omeka project we all added items to Dr. Hadden’s Omeka site. I repeated this step until I had ten items on my site all pulled from the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

I also wanted to add a collection to my site, to do this I clicked the side tab labeled “collections” and then clicked “Add a Collection”. After filling out the information as to what this collection would hold I selected all ten of my items and added them to the collection titled “Kalamazoo Institute of Arts”.

Finally I added the exhibit, to do this I selected “exhibits” from the side tabs and then created a page about the American Art within the collection. I also added a title and a description of the art. I continued this for the Japanese art in the collection on a separate page and then was finished with my exhibit.

Week 2:

In the second week of creating my Omeka site my goal was to make my site compliant with ADA accessibility. Some aspects of my site that show the ADA compliance include the colors and fonts used on the site. The high contrast between the white background and dark blue text make the content on the site more readable. The font used is very simple and easy to read making that aspect of the site also ADA compliant. The font could be thicker for even more visibility however I only have the basic, free version of Omeka so this is not an option for me.

I also referenced Omeka’s own accessibility statement to help me make my site more accessible found here: https://omeka.org/classic/docs/GettingStarted/Accessibility_Statement/

Various features are included in the basic Omeka site’s plugins that assist in accessibility such as ARIA which makes tabbing through page content easier when not using a mouse or screen reader. There is also the ability to skip the navigation menu when using the keyboard or a screen reader. These features allow my own Omeka site to be more ADA accessible.

More ideas for a more advanced site would include captions, transcriptions, and audio descriptions for multimedia. This would include if there were videos that had audio descriptions to make the information more easily accessible for those who needed it.