The observant among you might have noticed that I haven’t written about what I’m doing here in the states yet workwise. I can assure you that this is not because I haven’t been working!!! As with any new role there was an acclimatisation period, but my work with Wired! is a bit special in that I have the freedom to shape my role to meet the groups’ needs and my own. Being the kind of data driven personality that I am, figuring out where my skills could be put to best use to support the work of the group was based on observation and interaction with the group members and there was certainly a lot to catch up on! We are someway there though so let me divulge a little of what I’ve been up to lately…
One of the principle skills I’ll be using here is in archive and data management. The Wired! group have a series of projects and a need for a solid repository in which to maintain them. I have spent quite a bit of my professional life to date doing something or the other along these lines, but here the opportunity and excitement is in helping to put in place a system with broader data content, a wide user base and public interface. The data is varied but similar in form to what is held in most UK HERs. The records must be accessible to researcher teams here and abroad, and incorporate student projects to allow studies to grow from work undertaken in different semesters or years by different teams of students. I have been putting quite some effort into understanding the existing systems and data while researching potential solutions.
The system that I have worked with over the past two weeks in this regard is Omeka, a free flexible and open-source system for publishing library and museum archives, collections and exhibitions. We are intending to integrate this into some of our teaching here next semester and so thanks to the hard work of the lovely Sarah Goetz we have recently set up trial install to play with.
One of the nicest things about Omeka is a plugin called Neatline which is currently being developed by a clever team at the University of Virginia Library. Neatline allows the visualisation of maps and creation of timelines from items within a collection. The set up of this plug-in relies on Geoserver and has been a little faffy at times, so it has been great to be able to contribute some GIS know-how to the team to get the ball rolling. Most exciting of all to my little geeky brain was discovering that we have been successful in importing vector features into the plugin, when all others applications thus far had been been sticking to geotiffs. The next task for me as regards this work is to establish a robust geodatabase to house the student work georectifying and mapping features locally and serve as the WMS for neatline via Geoserver. I’m currently investigating options for this so if anyone has any tips feel free to wing them my way. 🙂
Conversely one of the nastiest things about Omeka out-of-the-box is the lack of data validation and QA. As always, I am worried about rubbish in:rubbish out and currently the interface, though laudably flexible, provides no checks or measures on the data being entered. High quality data is important to ensure high quality future research but is also a reputational issue when your data will be publicly available. It is clear that if we wish to use Omeka to store and display student work then we will have to work on procedures for data entry to combat the lack of look up tables / drop down lists and other helpful tools and maybe even develop the interface to incorporate some of these. Luckily procedures for data entry is another thing that I have lots of experience with. Happy days! Interfaces for sql databases however is another matter…
Anyway when I get time (checks watch for a 25 hour in the day) I will be uploading some more of my Salisbury Plain data as a test project in Omeka that y’all can have a play with and see how neatline works for yourself… but right now it’s time for bed!