We’ll be holding workshops at THATCamp MCN on several technologies and subjects that are key for museum professionals. Be sure to bring a laptop with wi-fi capability, as the workshops will be hands-on. Here’s what we have so far:
Introduction to Omeka
Instructor: Amanda French
Difficulty level: Beginner
Prerequisites: None
Omeka is a simple system used by scholarly archives, libraries, and museums all over the world to manage and describe digital images, audio files, videos, and texts; to put such digital objects online in a searchable databases; and to create attractive, customizable web exhibits from them. In this introduction to Omeka, you’ll create your own digital archive of images, audio, video, and texts that meets scholarly metadata standards and creates a search engine-optimized website. We’ll go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka and the open source server-side version of Omeka, and we’ll learn about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects.
Advanced Omeka
Instructor: Patrick Murray-John
Difficulty level: Advanced
Prerequisites: Knowledge of HTML, CSS, and PHP
In this workshop, one of Omeka’s developers will go over some tips and tricks for customizing (read: ‘hacking’) an Omeka theme or plugin, how to explore Omeka’s code base to understand it better, and how to get started creating your own plugin or theme from scratch. We’ll balance those three broad topics to taste when we meet and get a sense for what will be most helpful for the group as a whole.
HistoryPin
Instructor: Jon Voss
Difficulty level: Beginner
Prerequisites: None
Historypin (www.historypin.com/) is a public history project developed by London non-profit We Are What We Do in partnership with Google and over a hundred cultural heritage institutions worldwide. The project aims to bring millions of people together around historical content and the stories and recollections behind it. The free site and mobile smartphone apps enable users to pin content in place and time, as well as layer street level content onto Street View. This workshop will walk through the major features of the site and app, give a tutorial on pinning photos, and give an overview of Historypin’s collaborative education and community outreach programs. We’ll also preview forthcoming features specific to our institutional partnerships.
Augmented Reality
Instructor: Markus Wust
Difficulty level: Beginner
Prerequisites: Accounts for Layar and Hoppala (see below)
Augmented reality, once limited to the realm of science fiction, has become a reality and an ever-growing number of apps for various mobile device platforms allow us to use it in a variety of ways, not just for the promotion of commercial products and services, but also for educational purposes and entertainment. After a short introduction to augmented reality, workshop participants will create a small augmented reality project of their choosing (e.g., tour of a historical site) for the Layar Augmented Reality Browser (www.layar.com). This project can then be viewed on any device capable of running Layar.
If you want to actively participate in the workshop, you will need to sign up in advance for a free Layar developer account at www.layar.com/accounts/login/?next=/publishing/. This allows you to publish “layers,” i.e., collections of points that can be viewed in the browser. Also, you will need a free account for Hoppala, the web-based tool that we will use to store and edit the information for the points in the layer. You can sign up at augmentation.hoppala.eu/
