Software activism on the archival front: engaging Omeka

26 May 2022
re-source ‘Map your collection’ workshop with Sanjin Muftic (DLS) and Nina Liebenberg (APC) featuring work in progress by APC PhD student, Vanessa Chen. image: screenshot of zoom workshop, 3/03/2022
26 May 2022

The APC’s Five Hundred Year Archive (FHYA) project engages critically with the kinds of software available for the production of digital archives. This involves assessing both the professional assumptions involved - what various kinds of software allow or promote, and what they inhibit – and cost and sustainability issues.

To this end members of the FHYA project undertake research into and try out various options, in the process engaging the developers and users of the different software systems.

Omeka

Early on, the FHYA engaged with the then recently developed open-source Omeka system, and in 2014 secured funding to bring Omeka specialist, Sharon Leon, to South Africa for workshops held at WISER in Johannesburg and at the APC in Cape Town. Subsequent engagements with Omeka have been facilitated by Afridig (Programme in African Digital Humanities) where the FHYA is part of a multi-institutional research consortium of three projects that share a focus on the deep southern African past. Productive debate about the merits of different archival and collections management systems, including Omeka, were at the heart of Afridig workshops in July 2019, October 2019, March 2020 and March 2021. The latter half of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 has also seen Afridig training sessions specifically devoted to Omeka, as well as a growing interest in the software at the University of Cape Town.

While Omeka system proves strong in enabling the showcasing of archival materials, it is, as Sharon Leon readily admits, not especially useful in terms of its archival affordances.

In 2022, the FHYA team has begun using Omeka S (an updated version of Omeka) as part of re-source, a collaborative research project between the FHYA and UCT Digital Libraries Services (DLS). The project responds to the UCT DVC’s call to develop a competence in digital curation for researchers and postgraduate researchers. It is coordinated by Sanjin Muftic (DLS), Nina Liebenbrg (APC post-doctoral fellow) and FHYA Digital Archival Manager, Debra Pryor. ​​

re-source, open to, amongst others, History MA students, offers a year-long workshop programme. It guides researchers in thinking critically about how they curate their research in a digital environment and introduces them to tools such as collection mapping, object juxtaposition, object narratives and metadata exercises. The workshops culminate in digital curations on ibali, UCT’s Libraries’ digital collections showcase.

One of the 2022 re-source sub-projects concerns the record of the 1988 Upington Trial. The materials are currently in the process of being donated by trial lawyer Andrea Durbach to UCT’s Special Collections, where the record will eventually be processed using AtoM archival software. The inclusion of this sub-project in re-source allows the FHYA, working with UCT’s Dogotal Library Services, to research processes of linking Omeka-based showcasing to an Atom-based archival management system, and to another home-grown digital archive system, Simple DL, developed in collaboration with UCT’s Computer Science department.