My main goal was to create a news archive containing contemporary information about the life and work of British explorer Freya Stark (1893-1993). I wanted the archive’s materials to be a) free for the casual researcher, b) digitized, searchable images, c) displayed in their original contexts, and d) irrespective of source language. There are hundreds of articles about Freya Stark online, but most of them are hidden behind paywalls or subscriptions, and simple Google searches in English fail to turn up articles written in other languages. Since Stark was a polyglot nomad, I think it’s more fitting for researchers to be able to read about her in several languages instead of one.
A thought: I wasn’t able to upload any source that doesn’t use a Latin alphabet (my limitations, not necessarily Omeka’s), nor could I decide whether or not I should include tags in respective languages for foreign articles. I decided to stick with English, since my metadata is written in English, but, in the future, I would like to think of ways to tag effectively in several languages at once.
Here’s my final Omeka project.
My second, alternative archive is simply my Zotero collection, which I used while building the Omeka archive. It’s not visually impressive, but using Zotero to catalog sources made writing metadata so easy. I’m hooked on it now.
Here’s my Zotero collection. (And a screenshot of it below, for those who aren’t Zotero users.)
