The Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition was initially attracted to Omeka as a temporary publication platform that would deliver document facsimiles, transcriptions, and limited metadata to meet the demand of interested researchers while a more robust interface that could link the documents together using networks of identified and annotated people, places, organizations, and geographical features could be developed. The pre-existing set of tools to achieve these goals and the active development community made Omeka a cost- and time-effective intermediate publication solution.
CWGK manages its editorial work through DocTracker, a FileMaker based editorial application that exports records in TEI-XML. TEI-XML documents consistently record and represent a text and metadata about the text's form, history, and provenance. Regardless of the publication platform chosen, TEI-XML would be the basic output format for CWGK.
CWGK images the documents the project accessions at 300 dpi TIFF files, but chose to group images and convert them to single-document multi-image PDF files for day-to-day editorial work. To save an extra step of converting these PDFs into another format for web display, CWGK hoped to use these PDFs in its web interface.
CWGK and developer/designer Anneliese Dehner (@anneliesedehner) wanted to ensure that identified front-end users (students, teachers, researchers, and genealogists) could locate and read a document in the following ways:
- Simple keyword searches
- Faceted navigation
- Browsing within a repository
- Browsing within a collection
- Advanced searches in any combination of the following fields: accession number, collection, date of creation, dates mentioned, document genre, document title, editorial note, item location, place of creation, repository, transcription
- Browsing exhibits which feature documents
- Browsing featured collections from the home page
And CWGK wanted the following back-end features for its own staff:
- Upload new XML documents as editorial work is completed
- Monitor site usage
- Create new collections
- Edit transcription metadata and mark-up
- Create exhibits
- Feature collections and exhibits on the home page
All of which Omeka could do with its core set of tools and capabilities or with an arrangement of plugin and third-party tools.
Omeka Report Table of Contents
Civil War Governors of Kentucky requirements from Omeka