From: "Bobbie Erdmann" <bobbiee@centurytel.net> Subject: RE: Collection Management & Public Access software/application Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2018 13:24:57 -0500 Message-ID: <5378809A58C840CA80A008D6C0212545@ErdmannHP>
If you are just looking for internal record keeping you might want to look
into "Museum Archives".
It is a free program that will even keep track of your volunteers and their
activities. We just got the program
and haven't started using it yet. We are a small, volunteer-run museum and
wanted it especially for inventory
recording and control. Couldn't afford the costs for PastPerfect, plus it
has much more than we needed.
Bobbie Erdmann
Berlin Area Historical Society
_____
From: localhistory-request@listserve.uwec.edu
[mailto:localhistory-request@listserve.uwec.edu] On Behalf Of Jennifer Scott
Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2018 9:20 AM
To: localhistory@listserve.uwec.edu
Subject: Re: Collection Management & Public Access software/application
Thank you so much, Michelle! You just made my day!
I am hoping to use Omeka as a full-site cms. It looks like you're
maintaining a separate wordpress site. Is that right? Did you find Omeka
didn't work well for general content? Are there any plugins for it that you
wish existed? I'm thinking of making some, maybe one to handle events. Last
I looked, I didn't find one.
Your workflow sounds like what I expected. I would love to know the steps
you take. What did you do to map the two systems at the start? I wonder if I
could create a job plugin that could be configured to automatically import
new data? I can't see us moving away from PastPerfect and it would be nice
to automate that process.
I'll definitely be in touch with more questions! Thanks, again!
Jen
On Sat, Mar 17, 2018 at 5:40 PM Michelle Gobert <gobert@frontier.com> wrote:
Hi all,
We are using both PastPerfect and Omeka. I really like Omeka for its ease
of use and controlled vocabulary plugins for volunteer projects. I did
figure out how to export from PastPerfect and import them into Omeka.
Jen, next time I export a PastPerfect collection and import it into Omeka, I
can jot my steps down for you. My work flow consists of adding items to
PastPerfect and then exporting the collection to Omeka. ( I'm not sure how
long we will continue to maintain two databases. It's just one of those
things we do since our original workflow was PastPerfect and it cost us
quite a bit of $$. ) If you have specific questions about the
export/import process, feel free to email me directly. My email is listed
below.
Katie, I highly recommend Omeka for your situation. It would allow your
photo collections to be online and yet your three seasonal employees could
access the collections and metadata from anywhere they have internet access.
The problem I ran into (but solved it) was that we wanted our "collections"
to be harvested by RecollectionWisconsin. But we couldn't afford the cost
per collection (since in PastPerfect our collections total about 50) Once I
realized this was a semantics issue and not a metadata issue, I simply
created 5 harvestable collection headings on Omeka and the PastPerfect
Collection title is included in Omeka as another field.
Our Omeka interface can be found at http://www.crandonpl.org/archives/
<http://www.crandonpl.org/archives> if you want to take a look.
Let me know if you have any more questions! I'm interested in helping more
organizations discover the benefits of Omeka!
-Michelle Gobert
Crandon Area Historical Society
On Thu, Mar 15, 2018 at 10:01 AM, Kathryn Otto <kathryn.otto@uwrf.edu>
wrote:
Hi Katie,
We are using PastPerfect for our photographs and like it for that. I have
found it good for photographs, and we can identify the collection (in the
Collection Note) as well as the individual image. We plan to use their
online version when we have enough of the catalog records in reasonable
shape. ;-)
You are right that PP is not good for archives. Since it was designed by
museum people, primarily for museum objects, it tries to shoe-horn archival
collections into the single-object style used for museum items--doesn't work
very well. I tried to put some of our digitized letters into PP and gave
up; it was taking too much time to figure it out, time that I didn't have.
I have not used Omeka, but UW-Parkside uses it for their digital
collections: https://archives.uwp.edu/. You might want to talk to their
archivist, Melissa Olson (olsonm @ uwp.edu). They are quite happy with it.
Kathryn Otto
UW-River Falls
From: localhistory-request@listserve.uwec.edu
[mailto:localhistory-request@listserve.uwec.edu] On Behalf Of Katie Kirby
Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2018 1:35 PM
To: localhistory@listserve.uwec.edu
Subject: Collection Management & Public Access software/application
Hi all!
Does anyone have any experience using programs like CollectiveAccess or
Omeka? I'm looking at options for how to manage our collections and make
them (primarily our photo archives) more accessible online and am a little
lost.
There are so many options: PastPerfect Online, Recollection Wisconsin,
CollectiveAccess, Omeka, and others I'm sure. What do you use and why do you
like it? What don't you like about it? What does it cost you annually?
We currently have PastPerfect and I'm not a big fan of how it handles
archives - feels very clumsy. We have about 50 photos on Recollection
Wisconsin, which is great for our highlights, but not our entire
collections. I like the idea of web based platforms as our three part-time,
seasonal employees work off laptops with Google Drive as our sort of shared
'server.' Because of this, we only use one computer to catalog, but I want
all of them to be able to remotely. (Sidenote, I've been thinking about
trying to put our PP5 files on Google Drive so that all our laptops could
access the data files... would that work?)
Would appreciate some discussion.
Thanks!
Katie