This week during my drop in shift, I worked on creating an exhibit of photos from Disco Harris 2024 on my Omeka site. I wanted to collect photos from a really fun night earlier this month. I think some of these photos would be a solid edition to a digital collection of photos documenting Grinnell College student life, traditions, and music.
When I worked with Omeka for the first time at the beginning of February this year, I focused more on my individual items. This time, I worked more on creating a cohesive exhibit. I thought carefully about how I wanted users to view my collection. Rather than choosing to have my exhibit displayed as images with text, I selected a gallery for my layout. I wanted to highlight the images themselves, rather than my descriptions. Because I was more familiar with adding items to Omeka and creating collections and exhibits this time, I could pay more attention to the users’ experiences.
I would still like to explore creating different types of exhibits with a variety of file types. However, with more practice adding items, I feel more comfortable with how I could use Omeka to create an intuitive webpage for users to access a variety of digital collections. One new aspect I need to learn more about is copyright and authorship. For this exhibit, I used photos and I did not know who took all of the photos. I need to learn more about how to respect copyright laws when authors, photographers, and other metadata is unavailable.
