The Visual Resources Association Foundation (VRAF) is pleased to announce that registration is open for Exhibit, Instruct, Promote, Collaborate: An Introduction to Omeka for Digital Scholarship to be held on March 1, 2019. This workshop will be hosted by the University of Chicago and is open to cultural heritage professionals, the information, museum, and educational communities, and anyone interested in visual culture. The VRAF is grateful to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for their continued support of this exciting opportunity to partner with cultural heritage and educational institutions. Four scholarships are available to cover the registration fee for this workshop. See below for more information.

 

Workshop Description: Are you a beginning Omeka user who would like to know more about its capabilities and possible uses? This workshop will explore both the Omeka.net (free, remote hosted) and the Omeka.org (free, to install on your own server) versions, and the newest product, Omeka S (a way to manage many collections under one admin interface). Plug-ins, mapping and loading data, and customization will be covered. There will be time at the end to brainstorm about workflow scenarios and case uses of Omeka by visual resources professionals, as well as by faculty and students. Participants should bring their own laptops if they want to participate in the hands-on portion of the workshop.

About the Instructor: Susan Jane Williams is a 28-year member of the Visual Resources Association and served as its Vice President in 1999 and 2000. Following a career as a botanical illustrator, Williams graduated from Ohio State University with an MA in Art History and began working as a Slide and Media Librarian at Rochester Institute of Technology in 1990. Because Rochester is the home of Kodak, she was involved in some early and innovative digitization projects. Hired by Yale University, she was charged with building their first digital teaching collection. She won the DeLaurier Award from VRA in 2007 for developing a cataloging database tool, VCat, which utilizes VRA Core 4 and CCO and is capable of Core 4 XML, and now, RDF with LOD output. She has worked as an independent cataloger and consultant since 2007, serving the academic and commercial image vendor communities.

 

Scholarships: As local hosts of the upcoming VRAF Regional Workshop, Bridget Madden and Nancy Spiegel are pleased to announce an award that is intended to provide four individuals with a fully-funded registration fee to attend the workshop, a $125 value. The application will be open through January 25, 2019. The four award recipients will be announced by February 1 and all applicants will be notified via email. You may access the application at https://goo.gl/forms/BctWzwDft62h4Pz12.

To register for Exhibit, Instruct, Promote, Collaborate: An Introduction to Omeka for Digital Scholarship and to learn more about the workshop, visit https://tinyurl.com/vraf-omeka-chicago. The fee for this day-long workshop is $125. If you have questions about registration, contact Beth Haas, VRAF Director, [log in to unmask]. For questions about the Regenstein Library venue or scholarship application, contact Bridget Madden, [log in to unmask], or Nancy Spiegel, [log in to unmask].