Reflection... What an Iguana does best!

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel… Except Plaza Midwood doesn’t have a tunnel. (Maybe they could have used one under the railroad tracks on Central. That would have changed the area’s history!) The Plaza Midwood project draws to a close on Thursday with our final presentation of our online exhibit, From the Miracle Mile to Plaza Midwood. So how was the experience of researching and building an Omeka.net exhibit as a group? What did we learn about Plaza Midwood and its context within Charlotte?

...she likes writing contracts more than she likes reading them.

I now know how to use "shall" properly in legalese.  Shall implies obligation.  But it's not "must," which implies requirement.

You shall read on.

...that she needs a second post about plug-ins!

Another useful plug-in for Omeka.net is CSV Imports.  Why, you ask...

Truth be told, Omeka can be a bit clunky when it comes to data entry.  By utilizing the CSV imports plug-in, you can input all your information in Excel, then export a CSV file into Omeka.  The only drawback is that since your values are separated by commas (hence Comma Separate Values!), any commas that are in cells such as Item Description will need to be treated specially.  This page will help you out if you choose to use this handy plug-in.

Now if you will excuse me, History Iguana needs to go sun.

...that plug-ins are a way to customize your Omeka.net site!

There are nine plug-in available at Omeka.net.  For a previous site I built for Special Collections, I used three:  Exhibit Builder (obviously!), Simple Pages, and Social Bookmarking.  Within the context of this course, Social Bookmarking is one of the better plug-ins.  I've used it myself to post items from an exhibit.

For the Plaza-Midwood neighborhood exhibit, this will be really great to spread the word about what we've found or have to say about PM's evolution.  Spreading the word has never been easier!

You can (somewhat) control where visitors share your information.  As you can see from the screenshot above, I chose Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo.  (Myspace...  Snort!)  I've never even heard of half of these.  Is there any social media sites on this list that you use?