unit 11

Perhaps because it is the freshest memory or maybe I have had more experience with evaluating websites in this field, but I was impressed with the Omeka site. In part I felt it was nicely geared for the beginner with both screencast and text based documentation. There was a logical set-up to the site and I felt the general overview was complete. One negative was that the FAQ page was deleted and had not been replaced for over a year. I particularly liked the Use Cases forum, in which developers explained how they used Omeka in different real life institutions. This gave me both insight into how to use Omeka but also a more general sense of what other types of people want to develop digital collections beyond libraries, archives and museums.

Drupal is aesthetically a little fussy for me but the documentation was significantly more detailed on the technical side than Omeka. It is also clearly much more popular and has been around longer which means its background information and forums have tackled more problems and offer more solutions. Drupal and Dspace home sites have a lot in common in terms of numerous links, depth of documentation and general sense of being overly full. An example from Dspace is the feature of linking ‘child pages’ to each main section. There are reasons why this would be helpful to follow a topic throughout the website but it adds on numerous links to the page that is unnecessary/confusing for the general user.

Jhove strikes a balance between the bustling atmosphere of Drupal and Dspace compared to the cleaner Omeka. It is clearly focused for IT staff. A concern is that some of the information is a little old. An example being that the news link has only two links, both from 2008. Has nothing happened in two years or is no one managing the website? Neither inspire a sense of confidence.

The OAI-PMH main site is deep and shows that the project has history and is a major international endeavor. It is a little impersonal and expects a certain amount of previous knowledge from its users on things like acronymns. My experience was positive with the install process but the website itself is a little intimidating.

One of the key features of all these systems is that they are open source based. To me this means the sense of community, communication and forum options, documentation and current news would be very important considerations in the choosing process. I like Omeka but the appeal of Dspace or Drupal is the large and active community of users that could provide support for free. It is a balancing act and I would give a lot of consideration to future support before making commitments.