Building the Exhibit
After digitizing the selected pages of The Commonwealth of Oceana, the next step in this project was to create an online exhibit to display the images alongside historical context and analysis. To do this, I used Omeka S, a free, open-source web publishing platform disigned for institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums to easily organize digital materials and build online exhibits. Omeka S is a leading platform in information institutions, and experience with it will be especially valuable as I pursue a career in Library and Information Science. Additionally, Omeka S is designed for improved accessibility. Digital exhibits created with the platform are compatible with screen readers, making them accessible for users with disabilites, and the software is continuously enhanced based on accessibility conformance reports.
Omeka S is a particularly useful website builder for exhibits like The Nature of the Bean because it is specifically designed for projects that combine digital objects with descriptive metadata. Instead of building a website only from individual pages, Omeka uses an object-centered structure, organizing materials as items within a database. Each item can include media (e.g. images or video), metadata, and descriptive text. Items can then be grouped into collections, which maintain a categorical link between items even when they are displayed on separate exhibit pages.
Omeka also promotes and supports consistent metadata practices for digital exhibits. The platform offers four common metadata vocabularies: Dublin Core, Dublin Core Type, Bibliographic Ontology, and Friend of a Friend, as well as the ability to import external vocabularies to support unique datasets. When adding a new item to Omeka, vocabulary options appear in a side panel, making it easy to select each field needed to describe the object. For this project, I used Dublin Core to record metadata for each item in my dataset. The standardized metadata will help ensure that my exhibit items stay searchable and connected to larger digital collections.
There are also limitations to Omeka S, which I had to consider before choosing to work on the platform. Omeka S does not offer built-in cloud hosting, and its sites are not permanent archives. Long-term preservation depends on responsible hosting, regular backups, and institutional support. For this project, the exhibit is hosted through Create UNL, a service provided by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that offers server space and software for student and faculty digital projects.
Create UNL accounts are limited to users enrolled in digital literacy or digital creation courses, and accounts older than two years are recycled to make space for new projects. This structure requires users to plan for the future of their work by backing up or migrating content before an account expires. Considering these limitations means that building my exhibit involved thinking about digital stewardship and the sustainability of online scholarship.