Week 3 - Omeka

This week's exercises involves using Omeka. Sign in to our project website at http://medievalottawa.org/admin/ with the username and password you set up in week 1. From the Omeka Dashboard, click on the tab "Collections" in the sidebar, and find the collection associated with your folio (collection here is used to describe the folios since they possess at least two images which are collected together - i.e. front and back). Scroll through the list until you find yours.

Click edit which appears in blue underneath the name of the "collection" on the right hand side. Once on the editing page, navigate to the Dublin Core tab. Dublin Core is a cataloguing standard meant to be inclusive beyond the traditional bibliographic information and thus can theoretically be used to describe any kind of object (e.g. book, statue, code on a disk). We must adapt it to suit medieval manuscripts and thus here is where you will enter all the important metadata for your folio.

Metadata is data that describes other data. In this case, the folio of the manuscript text is being described according to set categories, in part bibliographic (identifying author or title of work if possible, place of origin etc.), in part descriptive (what colour is the parchment, are their doodles in the margins etc.).

In the next lesson we will try to get you used to entering information in Omeka's Dublin Core set up.