Omeka Element Sets

Omeka now comes with the Dublic Core element set. CDWA-Lite is in the works.

Omeka is a free and open source collections based web-based publishing platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, educators, and cultural enthusiasts. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability.

MODS XML Schema Tool

Hre is a tool to validate records against the MODS XML Schema.

The Digital Library Federation's Aquifer is pleased to announce a new online service, the "MODS and Asset Action Explorer,". This is an experimental service developed at the University of Illinois Grainger Engineering Library as part of the DLF Aquifer American Social History Online project with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The service allows anyone to upload MODS XML files, including modsCollection files, and verify that those records comply to the MODS XML Schema and also to check the uploaded records against the Aquifer project's MODS Levels of Adoption Guidelines. In addition to MODS records, the service also allows the upload of Asset Action Packages which is another experimental format being developed by the DLF Aquifer project. An Asset Action Package is an XML file containing a defined set of actionable URIs for a digital resource that delivers named, typed actions for that resource.

Anyone is welcome to get an account and upload their MODS records for validation and checking. However, note that the system is still in the research/development stages, so expect that any posted records could get mangled or disappear for unknown reasons.

Tagging Study

Do Tags Work? by Cathy Marshall is an interesting study comparing tags, titles and descriptions of photos in Flickr.

Have I convinced you that tags aren't all they've cracked up to be? I hope I have, but nonetheless there's a lingering fascination. Surely there's something to be done about tags: we don't want to just turn up our noses at Mr. Weinberger's argument. They could be a compact and efficient way of describing pictures. After all, picture archiving is difficult. Witness Art Spiegelman's fine graphical account in the New Yorker more than a dozen years ago; he described the difficult work of senior librarian Arthur Williams who curated the New York Public Library's extensive picture collection for over 30 years. Just how do you turn a library patron's question, “I want a picture that conveys rough times ahead” into a photo of a three-masted schooner sailing into a storm?