Blog Week 9: Tutorial

Many scholars in DH are familiar with Omeka, an digital exhibit platform that allows users to create collections, items, and exhibits for public exploration. Often used in the fields of history and art studies, Omeka is a great tool for both organizing and increasing accessibility and engagement with sources and objects. Particularly useful is the exhibit function on Omeka, which allows users to organize their items and collections into a specific exhibit with different pages; this allows for a clear introduction to the exhibit, and lets the user organize the content into more categories than “items” and “collections.” If a user wanted to create a digital art exhibit, for example, they could have pages for the art, the artist, and the interpretation, with any further subdivisions into genre, style, time period, etc., as needed. For historical work, users have the option to organize their exhibit into any number of categories, again allowing for more detailed interpretation and organization than is available through the items and collections categories of Omeka more broadly. Exhibit creation also allows users to ensure that the items and analysis in an exhibit are clearly grouped together. Given the many uses and importance of Omeka to DH work, the following is a tutorial on how to create and populate an exhibit on Omeka, so as to make the platform a more accessible resource for DH scholars. Note that this tutorial assumes that users have already created their Omeka site, and as such focuses only on the creation of the exhibit, not the creation of an Omeka site in general. If you’d like a tutorial on how to do that, visit this link. 

1. From your Omeka dashboard, go to the “exhibits” panel, and click “Add an Exhibit.”

2. Now you can start editing your exhibit! Fill in the Title, Slug, Credits, and Description as you’d like, and choose a theme for the aesthetic layout of the exhibit. You can always change the theme later, and import new ones, if you don’t like the available options. You can also choose a cover image for your exhibit on this page. If you want your exhibit to be publicly available, make sure to click the “Public” box under “Save Changes” (and always remember to save your changes as you’re editing!) You can also choose to make your exhibit featured on your Omeka homepage, if you’d like.

3. Once you’ve established the basic information of the exhibit, it’s time to start adding pages. These pages can be for a project introduction, to organize artifacts, people, or any other content that you want to include in your exhibit. Omeka will automatically open the exhibit to a summary page, but if you want the exhibit to start at the first exhibit page, simply uncheck the box under “Use Summary Page?”

4. Fill in the title and slug fields for the pages you’d like to create. If you want, you can also make the page title in the exhibit menu shorter, but this is not required. The next step will be to start adding content to the pages, but there are a couple of things we need to do first.

5. First, if we add any images to our items, we need to make sure that they are visible. To do this, we need to make sure that the image pathway is correct in the Omeka directory. Go to the settings tab at the top of the page, and scroll down to see the entry for “ImageMagick Directory Path.” If this response is empty, Omeka will not display the images that you add to your items. Make sure that it reads “/opt/rh-imagemagick/bin” to create the correct pathway. Note that it is important to do this step before you start adding items. If items are created with images before the pathway is set, the images will still not process even after the pathway is created, and you will have to re-upload the images for those items. Save yourself some time and check this setting before you add any items! As always, make sure to save your changes before you exit the page.

6. Now that the image pathway is set, we can begin adding items. Add all the items you’d like your exhibit to feature, providing the information necessary to your project. If you need a tutorial on how to add items to Omeka, check out this link!

7. Add items to your exhibit pages by going to the “Content” section and selecting a block layout that includes a file (this could be “file with text,” “gallery,” “file,” or “carousel” – you can also add multiple content blocks to the same page). After selecting your block, click “add new content block” to add it to the page.

8. Once your content block is added, you can add files from your Omeka items, text, and more content blocks. If you want to edit the layout, click on “layout options” to edit the file position, size, and the position of the captions.

9. Once you’ve got your page looking how you want it (you can always check by saving your work and clicking “View Public Page”).

10. Create more pages and add more items as you need in order to fill out your exhibit. One of the benefits of creating an exhibit is that you are not limited to the categories of “items” and “collections,” and you can add many different pages with lots of items and information. If you decide to reorder the exhibit content, simply grab the arrows to the left of the page and drag to reorder. 

11. Once you have all the content you want and it has the correct order and style, you have completed your exhibit! Visit the public page to see how it looks, and remember that you can always revisit these steps if you come across things you’d like to change.