I made a note about Omeka and other tools from the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University in February of this year and ran into it again while reading an article by Penelope Coutas on using the iPhone as Method/s.  I posted her interesting use of new technology for ethnographic fieldwork on my Research Methods in Expressive Culture Course Blog. Her post prompted me to review Omeka in more depth. I plan on installing it in the near future on my own space and giving it a go.  I’ll let you know what comes of it.

For now,  I am providing an excerpt from the Omeka website.

What is it?

Omeka is a free and open source collections based web-based publishing platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, and educators.  It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation.

How would you use it?

Scholars:

• Use Omeka to publish an essay or digital dissertation, share primary source collections, and collaborate with others in the creation of digital scholarship.
• Features you might like: design themes, exhibit builder, tagging, dropbox plugin, iPaper plugin, geolocation plugin.
• Examples: Digital Worcester, Euclid Cooridor, Experiencing Medieval Places

Museum Professionals:

• Use Omeka to share collections and build online exhibits with objects you cannot display in the museum. Invite your visitors to tag and mark items as favorites, or to contribute content. Start a blog to publish museum news and podcasts.
• Features you might like: Dublin Core metadata standards, W3C and 508 compliant, design themes, exhibit builder plugin, MyOmeka plugin, contribution plugin, dropbox, data migration tools (coming soon).
• Examples: Object of History, Catawba River Docs, Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives

Librarians:

• Use Omeka as the publishing tool to complement your online catalog or launch a digital exhibit.
• Features you might like: Dublin Core metadata standards, W3C and 508 compliant, extensible and customizable item fields, RSS/Atom syndication, MyOmeka plugin, data migration tools (coming soon).
• Examples: Photographs by Homer L. Shantz, Eminent Domain, Upper Ringwood Library Collection.

Archivists:

• Use Omeka to share your collections, display documents and oral histories, or create digital archives with user-generated content.
• Features you might like: Dublin Core metadata standards, W3C and 508 compliant, exhibit builder plugin, extensible and customizable item fields, iPaper plugin, tagging, data migration tools (coming soon).
• Examples: Bracero History Archive, Hurricane Digital Memory Bank

Educators:

• Use Omeka to build inquiry-based tasks for students, to create lesson plans with accompanying primary sources, or build learning modules with your team.
• Features you might like: design themes, exhibit builder, MyOmeka plugin, blogging plugin, iPaper plugin, tagging.
• Examples: Laurel Grove School Teachers Workshop, Making the History of 1989.

Enthusiasts:

• Use Omeka to share you personal research or collections with the world, build exhibits and write essays that showcase your expertise.
• Features you might like: design themes, exhibit builder, contribution plugin, live directory (coming soon), blogging, tagging.

Excerpt from http://www.ppt-to-video.com/blog/a-few-tips-to-reduce-powerpoint-file-size.html

• Use compressed graphics file formats to reduce the size of PowerPoint. There may be many images in graphic formats like bitmap (.bmp) in your PowerPoint presentation. The suggestion is to open bitmap image with a program that converts images and save the image in one of the following graphic file formats: jpg, gif, tif, wmf.

• Once your image has been saved under another format, you can reinsert it into your slide. If you do this for all your images, your presentation will be much smaller and it will run smoothly and fast.

• Save your presentation under a new name to reduce the size of your presentation.  PowerPoint usually stores lots of redundant information (earlier drafts, previous used images). Once your presentation has been saved as another file, the unnecessary redundant information is purged.
• Choose E-mail (96 ppi) output to reduce the size of PowerPoint.
  • Tools >>Format >> Compress Pictures >> Options >> Target Output >> E-mail (96 ppi)

• For PowerPoint XP and 2003, right-clicking the image >>Format Picture >> Compress >> Web/Screen) This will change all the pictures used in your presentation to an optimal size.

• Insert a hyperlink instead of inserting an object to reduce the size of PowerPoint.  Remember, you will need the Internet for this option!

• Insert >> Picture >> From File >> Select the image you want to insert >> Click the little down arrow besides Insert >> Link to File