> I was also wondering if anyone had built Drupal or WordPress plugins
> for systems like Omeka?

Just picking up this point: we (I'm at the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London) have been running a programme of work looking at ways to facilitate and simplify the business of connecting up museum / gallery / archive collections data with public facing websites.  One of the things we've been looking at in particular is solutions that are appropriate for smaller institutions where using Open Source CMS like Omeka, WordPress, Drupal etc is really important (from all the obvious reasons already mentioned here incl. cost, ease of use, sustainability, ease of finding a supplier, etc).

One case in point - we have been working with Omeka for the University of London's 'Museum of Writing' project.  In this case a commercial Collections Management System (Ke EMu) was selected for various reasons including the flexibility of its API; we're building a set of plugins for Omeka which will connect the two applications together but which will actually provide much tighter integration than the usual 'search / browse / single record view' which is often as far as people are able to go.  In particular we are working with some of the existing Omeka plugins allowing end users to curate collections etc to work with objects from the discrete EMu repository.  (When we're done the plugins will be made freely available on the Omeka plugins page).   

Hopefully the work we've done should be useful for other people to reverse engineer since (crucially) the bulk of the work is primarily Omeka-centric (rather than particularly dependent on the way the data is coming from the Collections Management System involved).  We're exploring similar projects with WordPress and Drupal and anything we do here will also be made freely available.  For WordPress for example we've been planning on a plugin that would add a tab to the media browser and allow website admins to select objects from their collections management system in the same way you'd select an image for a gallery.  We don't have any current plans to deploy CollectionsSpace in anger but we are looking at it and the methods it provides for publishing out metadata.  

As an aside, a complicating factor in all of this is the issue of how to handle user contributed content (or more specifically user contributed 'objects' of whatever type) when you're working both with a curated collection, stored in a for-purpose Collections Management System of some sort, and a web content management system which both surfaces the collection, and provides the interface for end users to attach their objects and metadata.  In this situation figuring out a workflow and deciding where and how to store user contributed data with respect to the 'formal' collection is tricky from an analytical point of view (irrespective of whether you've got Open Source tools managing the collection and/or the website).  It does mean though that the nature of the ligature between a Web CMS and a Museum Collection Management System may have to be more than superficial in some cases, and user curated objects and crowdsourcing projects focussed on capturing public memory are only going to become more popular - so this issue will keep popping up.

Best wishes

Paul





Paul Vetch
Department of Digital Humanities
King's College London
26-29 Drury Lane
London WC2B 5RL
Office tel.  +44 20 7848 1040
Work mob. +44 7713 087446

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