Omeka on the Big Screen

We did a soft launch of the Sir Robert Hart 1835-1911 digital exhibition on the amazing 42inch touchscreen installed in the Library. Although not planning for making the product available to the wider populace just yet, the experience of seeing the lightly modified Berlin-themed exhibit on the gesture-based interface cast hesitancy to the wind. The addition of the very simple geolocation plugin alongside the Neatline Time plug-in provide a couple of very helpful visualisations to aid in navigation. There’s not a lot of bells and whistles, but the simple elegance really shines through on the large surface. The exhibition itself comes from a booklet produced by Deirdre Wildy back in 2003 and really lends itself to an Omeka feature. The objects are drawn from the Library’s ContentDM repository and Deirdre and Dr Dan Li along with staff from Special Collections combined for a super narration. It’s a first step in the water for using Omeka in the Queen’s Library and all feedback is welcome.

Omeka proves to be a superb platform to stage this from. The careful control of navigation options, enforced dublin core and the the future extensibility all figure in the decisions to choose it as a means to stage. Although we did a static ingest of objects from ContentDM via the CSV facilities on both suites, our longer term hope is to be able to tap into data streams as more  digital collections are made available from the Queen’s Library and Special Collections.

Edit: For those interested, the touchscreen we use is an ELO 4201L.