In addition to user-proposed sessions and meetings, THATCamps are also often great places to attend hands on workshops led by experts in the field. THATCampAAR is very fortunate in that will have a number of wonderful sessions offered by some very smart and generous scholars. Over the course of the next few weeks I’ll be posting brief abstracts of the workshops we’re hosting, but you can get a sneak peak at all of them over at the schedule right now.

Our first workshop preview is for learning the basics of Omeka, an open source program to create digital archives and web exhibits. The workshop will be lead by  Amanda French, Research Assistant Professor and THATCamp Coordinator at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, who has agreed to join us in Baltimore!

Building Scholarly Online Archives with Omeka

These days, any scholar or organization is almost certain to have a collection of digital material from research and teaching: scanned texts, digital images, original syllabi, even historic songs, oral histories, or digital video. Omeka is a simple, free system built by and for scholars and cultural heritage professionals that will help you publish and interpret such digital material online in a scholarly way so that it’s available for researchers, students, and the public in a searchable online database integrated with attractive online essays and exhibits. In this introduction to Omeka, we’ll look at a few of the many examples of Omeka websites built by archives, libraries, museums, and individual scholars and teachers; define some key terms and concepts related to Omeka; learn about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects; and go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka at omeka.net and the self-hosted version of Omeka at omeka.org. Participants will also learn to use Omeka themselves through hands-on exercises, so please *bring a laptop* (not an iPad). Learn more about Omeka at omeka.org and  omeka.net.

The complete Introduction to Omeka lesson plan is available on Amanda French’s website or via j.mp/intro-omeka.