Preparing to Participate

Preparing to Participate

Is your organization ready to share your historical collections online with your community? Joining CVL Collections and putting your collections online using Omeka is a great option for many organizations. But it also requires thoughtful planning to ensure the long-term success of your site. Take some time within your organization to review the questions below and discuss whether you are prepared to start and sustain this project. When you are ready to discuss it further, please contact Amy Hitchner to set up an initial meeting.

Goals

  • What are you organization’s goals for this project? What do you hope to accomplish by putting your historical collections online?
  • What is your timeline for launching your Omeka site and sharing your first collection?

Collections

  • Have you identified the collections that you would like to put online?
  • Are your collections already digitized? If yes, where are they located? If not, how do you plan to digitize them?
  • Do you already have collections in an online platform that you would like to migrate to Omeka? Are you willing to work with your vendor to help facilitate that migration?

Staffing

  • Who will work on this project? It’s best if a permanent staff member can be the primary contact, with at least one other staff member or volunteer to help.
  • How much time can staff reasonably devote to this project, including initial setup and ongoing maintenance?
  • How much experience does staff have with digital collections and/or digitization?
  • Do you have a succession plan as staff members change roles?
  • How will you train volunteers or student workers?

Storage

  • Omeka is a platform for sharing digital collections online. Omeka is not a long-term archival solution for your digital files.
  • Do you have a long-term storage plan for your digital files that includes redundancy and backups?

Cost

  • CVL Collections offers up to 10 GB of file storage for each partner. Most smaller collections stay well within that limit, especially when they use smaller or compressed files like JPG and MP3 instead of full-size TIFF or WAV files.
  • However, in the event that your organization does use more than 10 GB, are you able to cover the annual storage cost as outlined on the Cost page?

Communication

  • How will you share your digital collections with your community?
  • Does your organization have a website?