Reflecting on Omeka

Using Omeka was quite an experience!
From the very beginning, it gave me the impression of old-style sites with the strong html flavor. It is not a bad thing, but at times where most sites are visually captivating I was taken aback by how wikipedia-like Omeka feels. And through its exploration I got an idea of what are the upsides and downsides of that design choice.

First, let’s begin with the advantages. It clearly serves its purpose – it is made for those who prioritize clear categorization of featured items and keep a detailed record of their metadata. It has a great system of adding items, where each gets the deserved classification. In WordPress I always end up storing no longer used media, often multiple versions of the same image, but I am not confident on which one to delete. Here, it is much cleaner to look through the imported content. Furthermore, it is also great how it incentivizes full description of featured data, so that anyone who finds it on the site can trace it back to where it came from, which does not seem like standard for images online. What is the most wonderful about Omeka is that it is open sourced, allowing for users’ creativity to make up for Omeka’s shortcomings.

So, what are some of those aspects of Omeka I would like to change? A big one is the set of problems I ran into from the very start. Just to add an image to the post I needed to troubleshoot 3 different issues. While the solutions proposed on Omeka forum worked well, I still wish there was no issues to begin with — meaning that maybe the initial setup should be more forgiving to a first-time user that may not want to google around for help. The interface seems less intuitive than most of other platforms I worked with — especially when it comes to said troubleshooting, but yet it is simple enough to navigate the basic procedures even with little design experience.

Overall, Omeka gets a strong B+ from me. If the potential use case pressures the importance of concise data storage — going with Omeka should be the right choice.