19.07.2017
Extending Omeka for a Large-Scale Digital Project
« In September 2016, the department of Special Collections and Archives, Kent State University Libraries, received a Digital Dissemination grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to digitize roughly 72,500 pages from the May 4 collection, which documents the May 1970 shootings of thirteen students by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University. This article will highlight the project team’s efforts to adapt the Omeka instance with modifications to the interface and ingestion processes to assist the efforts of presenting unique archival collections online, including an automated method to create folder level links on the relevant finding aids upon ingestion; implementing open source Tesseract to provide OCR to uploaded files; automated PDF creation from the raw image files using Ghostscript; and integrating Mirador to present a folder level display to reflect archival organization as it occurs in the physical collections. These adaptations, which have been shared via GitHub, will be of interest to other institutions looking to present archival material in Omeka. (…) »
