I’ve been using OMEKA this semester to produce a class website that includes a digital facsimile, transcript, and readerly edition of a manuscript.  Additional materials produced by students have included GoogleMaps & GoogleEarth maps, a Glogster page, and a Flash exhibit.  It’s running on an Amazon AMI, and can be seen at 23.21.246.240/ . As part of this I’ve started using a variety of plugins, and had to start playing around with Omeka’s style and plugins.  I’d love a session that talks about how to get your feet wet with plugin organization, development, changing the Omeka themes, adding fields to the MySQL database that backs Omeka up, etc.

I’ve experimented a bit with using commercial database software—Filemaker Pro and Bento—to store the text of historical correspondence (i.e. letters) I’ve found in archives, making it searchable and sortable. I’d be happy to demonstrate my databases and would be interested as well in hearing from others working with correspondence digitally. We could also discuss grander projects like the Darwin Correspondence Project and open source tools that could be applied to such work.