Building an Omeka Exhibit at the Fisher Fine Arts Library: Using JSTOR Forum with Omeka

Using the media management system JSTOR Forum (formerly Shared Shelf), you can upload files, add descriptive data, and publish them to your Omeka site. (This is not a guide to using Forum. For that, see the Forum support site.)

Note: The website Explore Fisher was created using JSTOR Forum with Omeka Classic, hosted on a local server. For information on Omeka-hosted sites, see omeka.net. For information on the new Omeka S, see omeka.org.

Advantages:

• If your institution or department already uses JSTOR Forum, you can add your images to its collections or make use of images already in the collection.

• You can easily add files and edit metadata in JSTOR Forum using different workflows. For example, you can edit the same field in multiple records at once. (Omeka does not allow you to do this, as of this writing, without uploading a CSV file.)

• JSTOR Forum handles large numbers of images easily.

Disadvantages:

• Using Forum is not as simple as uploading directly to Omeka.
• Old versions of the JSTOR Forum plugin may cause issues with Omeka.

Forum support has recently added clear and detailed instructions for setting up Omeka as a publishing target.

Tips:

• Forum supports sites in both omeka.org (locally hosted) and omeka.net (Omeka-hosted).
• You will need to have your Omeka site already set up, and create at least one collection. Forum publishes to Omeka collections, so this provides a specific target.
• Your administrator can establish your Omeka collection as a publishing target. (Or you can do this yourself from the JSTOR Forum admin site if you have access.)
• You will need to map fields from Forum to Omeka using a particular metadata schema. Omeka uses Dublin Core as a default, but other schemas are available as plugins.