Omeka for Family Archives

Omeka.net is an open-source web-based platform for managing content and curating online digital collections. The free plan allows up to 500mb of free storage with free website hosting, making it an ideal platform for anyone exploring the sharing of their family archives. I recently used this platform to complete an online digital collection for coursework at the Univerisity of Southern Mississippi in my Digital Preservation course and I wanted to share my experience here.

I recently spent time reviewing and digitizing family papers and discovered that what genealogy software and platforms lack is a way to organize and share content in a user-friendly way. I want to learn to describe content with appropriate metadata attached, which genealogy software does fairly well. Finding a platform that keeps content with its metadata, provides a storage solution, and allows me to share content in a meaningful way are all qualities that Omeka provides.

Organizing, Arranging, and Describing

In my coursework as a library science and archival student, I do a lot of reading about managing, organizing, and arranging resources and information. The tools and functionality available on Omeka gave me the opportunity to get some practical experience ingesting digital content into software for storage, preservation, and presentation. While not a full digital preservation software platform, the free version provides the ability to install add-ons for additional features and has built-in structured metadata fields for Dublin Core. The platform also allows for tags to further organize and an exhibit add-in allows arrangement and presentation in series and preferred order.

Create an exhibit on Omeka to present your family photos

Storage, Security, and Sharing

A huge number of family photographs are stored in a Dropbox account. Like any cloud-based storage, I'm concerned with losing access or with proprietary changes to file structures. I can save photographs and digital files on my own hard drives, but the worry about technology failure is present. Having a backup storage solution that does double duty of also providing other family members with access is a plus. Omeka is a reputable non-profit with ongoing funding to further projects in digital preservation, which makes me confident in using the free trial version to test whether it would be a good long-term solution for family archives. Most individual families are not going to warrant attention from professional archives, so open-source platforms like Omeka are a good option for ensuring family history stays alive for future generations.

Family Archive Project

Check out my project! I curated twenty photographs of the William and Rose Blacker family (my great-great-grandfather and -grandmother) using Dublin Core metadata and Library of Congress Subject Headings for description on the Omeka.net platform.

References

Corporation for Digital Scholarship. (n.d.). Omeka [website]. Retrieved from https://omeka.org/