A colleague has asked me about Collective Access (http://www.collectiveaccess.org/) and I've not heard of it until now. Does anyone here have experience with it? I've looked at a couple of the featured projects and it looks similar to Omeka (it's a digital object content management system plus front-end for searching and display). I'm going to install it and play around to see what it can do and how it's different from Omeka, but I'd appreciate any insight or feedback from people who have used it. Thanks!
Experience with Collective Access?
(4 posts) (2 voices)-
Posted 4 years ago Permalink
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Kaia
MemberWhile they do some of the same things, Omeka is really a content management system for online exhibits, while CollectiveAccess is really a collection management system with a front-end that can be used for online exhibits.
Which might suit you best depends on your needs. If you need a fairly simple way to present photos, documents, etc. online, Omeka may be the solution. If you need a full tracking system for collections (including insurance valuations, location tracking, provenance fields, etc.), that's CollectiveAccess.
With CA, you can add fields for anything imaginable, and have total control over which of those fields are exposed on the front-end. With Omeka, there is a great selection of fields, but you cannot add your own, and they all default to showing on the front-end. While I suspect you could hack some of them to not display, there aren't built-in controls for that.Out of the box Omeka is easier to get up and running, and, if you're running on a shared server, more likely to be able to play media. We've got CA running on a shared server and can host video/audio that can be downloaded, but not played through the site, as CA comes with utilities to process those types of file that require settings our host won't allow. (We've therefore also got an Omeka install for some of those. This isn't ideal for us, but there's a chance this will change.)
Posted 4 years ago Permalink -
Thanks Kaia. I read through the documentation for CA and I couldn't find anything about either importing existing metadata or exporting (well, from a search result, but it's not clear how much that would include). Do you know if there is import/export function for the collection metadata?
Posted 4 years ago Permalink -
Kaia
MemberThat's one place where Omeka really excels and CA currently falls short. If you've got the time and expertise to script the import, it's possible. There are a variety of ways to export from searches, but I'm not sure how comprehensive they are, or if they're better in the recently released 1.2 (which we haven't upgraded to yet). (My concern at the moment isn't getting data out, it's getting it in!)
A nice, easy import (like what Omeka has) does not yet exist in CA. It was originally slated for an October 2011 release, which got moved to December 2011. That version was completely unusable by anyone but the software developers. They realized they needed to reconfigure it, and that was slated for 1.2, but has now been pushed back to 1.3 (with a September 2012 release date planned).Posted 4 years ago Permalink
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