 Hey everyone and welcome back. No surprise what we're gonna be talking about in this session because we talked about it in the last session. This is our impromptu show and tell time where we are looking to you all. We're gonna be highlighting a few examples of great work happening in the community. And while I'm talking here, I'm going to share a StreamYard link in the chat. If you want to share some of the work that you're doing live, feel free to come into that link. What's gonna happen is you will, you'll have a minute to kind of put your name in and come in and you'll be backstage. So you're not gonna come in and immediately be live if that's a concern. You'll also have an opportunity to prep sharing your screen beforehand and get all of that set, but we'll just kind of do this on the fly. That's kind of part of today. We have a green room back there, right? With some M&Ms. Right. Tom Woodward doesn't eat all the M&Ms. Make yourself at home. And in the meantime, we are going to start first with our very special guest. Tom Woodward has joined us and is prepped if we can bring him up and live. Oh, there he is. Hey, Tom. Hey. How are you? Good. How are y'all doing? Good. Thanks for joining. Maybe we could get his screen online and Tom can talk a little bit about the work that he's doing or highlighting, I should say. Yeah, thank you. All right, so this one is gonna, I don't know, it's maybe multiple splots, which maybe gets away from the idea of simple as possible, but you know, I have that problem. Yes, all in one site. But it's the idea that we can kind of shape how people are able to put in information in a lot of different ways, even if it's on one site. So we can make those tools specific to the context in which you're adding information. So the idea behind this site is we wanted a place where we could collect and display all the anti-racism work being done on Middlebury's campus. So that's what's going on here. It's a custom site, you know, we have some fun things like the font there is done by an African-American font designer. You know, we've done a couple of things to kind of try and make this site embody what it's meant to represent. These are actually Middlebury students protesting at the sanctuary campus kind of walk out in the past. And then we can start to look at like both finding and adding events. Now, because this is an anti-racist site, we do have it set so that the things don't become live immediately. We do have a layer of vetting, but say we wanted to add an event, we have some required fields that are just the necessary pieces. We have the ability to categorize the event by what kind of audience you're kind of looking for. You can add different elements, you know, that are as specific as you want. Nothing terribly exciting there, but it's this idea of being able to guide people when they add things. In this case, we also wanted to say, hey, you can look at different types of resources. Read, watch, listen to our categories. And this gets a little simpler, closer to the spot thing, title, link, summary, and resource type. Bam, you just add it. And then we got into this idea of being able to add people or groups that support anti-racist activity on campus or, you know, across the world. And we've got some fun things going on. You can see these are kind of randomized geometric patterns that were meant to kind of be for those things that we don't have featured images for, but we have just, it's that idea of like, what do you need to submit a person, name, description, social media stuff? To add a group, we have slightly different things to think about where we have group types. So nothing like magical or fancy here, but it's the idea of like, what's the least amount of work we can require somebody to do to give us the most amount of benefit. And we're not even asking for images in this case, just because in my experience, then you get into alt text issues and ratio issues and size issues. We just want the lowest possible bar to get people to add stuff here. And we have a couple of different ways for you to add it. And then we take care of the making it look pretty and then making sure it's appropriate or whatever at the editorial level. Can I ask you a question, Dr. Woodward? Are you using gravity forms to build this out? What is some of the process? I mean, you could go as deep or as shallow as you want, but how would someone go about doing something like this because I'm sure they can see the immediate value? How do you build it? Right, so in this case, we're using two different things because, I don't know, I was just messing around and because I can. So the events are gravity forms, although I could have done all of it through gravity forms. The other elements are ACF forms, advanced custom fields forms, just because I'd already built the theme with ACF stuff. And so it was super easy to map that over. So generally when I'm talking to people about it, they're probably gonna build it in gravity forms unless they do have some custom ACF stuff going on already. But everything I did there, you could do in gravity forms in almost the exact same way. And in some ways, like True Collector or some of the other spots we saw yesterday, Tiny Teaching Tools, like this becomes a resource site that the community can add to and build. Like it almost seems like it's part and parcel of a exhibit collection slash resource that would come out of the library, right? But opening up so that anyone can add to it and build on it. Right, and then I like that because I mean, you have choice in all aspects of this, I think. Like you can decide, do we want an editorial layer before it goes live or do we just let it go live? It's a choice. I think like the splot pieces, if they're already doing what you need them to do, use that. If you need more specification or a lot of customization, even if it's not a really complex workflow, then gravity forms oftentimes can make that sort of access easier for you. So it's always that back and forth balance. What do you need? What already exists? Where do you wanna invest your time and think through your workflows? And Tom, can I ask, where can people view the site? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that'd be useful. There we go, that's the studio and I'll throw it in this board. Awesome. I can grab it for you if you wanna co-sharing. Yeah, yeah. And I will just put it as a banner here to highlight for folks that are watching. Yeah, and the site does look beautiful. I mean, on another note, like I really love the way it looks. It's super cool. Super stylish. Yeah, thank you. So first site I ever built with kind of a group at Middlebury, so it was interesting because it's one of those contentious spaces. So we're working with a group that wasn't there, you know what I mean? Which is always dangerous, that like head people who make the decision weren't actually in the web development conversation. So I was actually really happy with what we were able to do. Well, thank you so much for sharing. This has been really great. I think we're gonna jump to our next participant here. So thanks, Tom. I'm gonna pull you out and pull our next visitor in. Hey, Ed, how are you? How are you, everybody? Thanks for joining. I know we kind of called you out in the last session like, hey, Hint Hint, are you sure? And now I come in with a completely different project and not the one you were talking about. See, that's the best. More projects is always better. I know, so if you're ready, we can share your screen. Yeah, let's do it. Cool, tell us what you're sharing today. So this is not a splot, but it's something that we've been working on for the last year. Our college, SUNY-ONIANTA, has a museum studies program that was founded in the 60s. It was one of the first museum studies programs in the United States. And they always had a community service aspect of the museum studies program where they went out and started doing oral histories way back in the 60s of people that were growing up in the rural-ONIANTA and leather stocking region area. And so this was a project that predated Domain of One's Own, is we had this OMEKA server that had all of these oral histories. It's using OMEKA Classic. And it became time to update this and to bring it into the future. And so we had a group of three students that were gonna do a redesign of the community stories. And one of the things that they did was they researched both OMEKA Classic and OMEKA S. And so here, they built a new hub of sites that is gonna be our mill library exhibits. And what we wanted to do is we were thinking about the same conversation that we had in the community chats about the value of multisites versus individual sites and how a multisite could help somebody get started really quickly. And so we really wanted to lean into that and build the new CGB community stories as the first branch of a multisite for OMEKA. And so this was the redesign of the community stories. Again, done by a student that is going to kind of bring us into the future. And we still have a lot of things to do. We did the big things. Again, we were trying to help them think systematically and not through like hard work. They were gonna like copy and paste every single one of these over. We did a full grab and pulled from the OMEKA Classic to the new OMEKA so that we do have all the transcripts, all the audio files, all the things that they've been building over time are still gonna be here. And then they have big visions for the future. They wanna be able to browse by map, add new collections. They have a whole programs where they don't use the OMEKA to be like their exhibit road builder. They use WordPress for that. So they have a project they call Listen to Everyone where they go and they do a community program using these oral histories. And now they're listen to everyone.com is now hosted on our, is now hosted on our reclaimed hosting on our domain of one zone. So just a cool project. And what we hope comes out of this project is not only that they're very happy with this OMEKA S space that they've built but now the next project that wants to use OMEKA will have a much shorter build up time because now we can give them a site on this multi-site and go a little bit quicker. What also resonated with me and what made me wanna share it was a comment that Lauren made about it, domains meaning something different to different people. Exactly. I went to our library and said, my brain is too full. I'm so invested in WordPress. Could somebody from your team really dig into OMEKA and be the person for OMEKA? And I have a great collaborator, Jennifer Jensen in the library who's our scholarly communications librarian. She's dug into OMEKA and become really interested with the entire domains project because this application matched the way she thinks as a librarian much better. And so now she wants to connect the OMEKA with the library catalog and connect the OMEKA so that the oral histories are searchable through our normal kind of library systems. And that's just engaged a new level of collaboration with this personality I already collaborated with quite closely. So I'm really excited about it. That's something that we talk about a lot. I love it. No, please go. It just shows you and inspires us. It's something we, at least I say a lot but I've heard we talk about a lot with at least internally at Reclaim with OMEKA like none of us are librarians by trade. And so that's something that kind of comes up a lot and I think is not necessarily just, I think other technologists may be running the same thing where like my brain is WordPress when I'm thinking about web projects so much. So I think that's a great idea of getting a librarian involved but not only just involved but like, all right, let's stake some ownership and so we can have multiple pillars to this project in a really cool way. We do have a lot of domain of one's own libraries that are thinking about how this would be helpful for the library in particular. And I'm also knowing that I know that one of our participants Amanda from SUNY Geneseo, I think Ed, you work maybe closely with Amanda and she also has that background in the library perspective as well. So, you know, it's... I think Matt from Harvard is also coming from a library point of view. And one of the things that really struck me at about what you were talking about this morning is OMEKA S as a multi-site alternative that, and tell me if I'm wrong in this thinking but like the power of OMEKA S like WordPress multi-site is that it kind of consolidates resources into one installation and it also builds maybe one point of access for that community to know where the exhibits live rather than distinct URLs all over your domain of one's own instance that in some ways could get lost as one-off projects. It almost brings things together and creates a critical mass of cool projects. Does that vibe with what you're finding with the work you're doing with the librarian? Yes, but OMEKA shares resources between sites in a very integrated way where a resource can exist in multiple sites and multiple exhibits. So they're a little bit more connected than like a WordPress where you have like your own sandbox and they do not talk to each other or touch. It's like one media library sort of. It's like there's a shared media library because it's really designed for a museum that maybe has a large collection but might pull from the collection in multiple ways. And say, oh, let me show you this aspect and I want to pull from this item and this item and this item and present it to you in a different way. And that's for people who get really involved in the exhibit builder of OMEKA. One thing about our OMEKA is we have really used it only for its collection features and we've offloaded the building of kind of a narrative into WordPress because they like the visual aspect which is another interesting point about that. I mean, the fact that you're actually able to use OMEKA as the archive for the resources with all the metadata but then pull that seamlessly into a dynamic WordPress site that takes you through the narrative. It's beautiful kind of marriage of the two tools. Ed, where can viewers go to see? The link is, I believe the link is now in the chat. Awesome, I was going to pull it into a banner. I think it's exhibits.library.onianta.edu. Awesome. Yes, Tom put the full thing in. Slash communities. I'll get the main one here as a banner for anyone watching this session later on. Doug, can you clarify your question in the chat a little bit? How do you match the WordPress OMEKA? Oh, right, for how do you match if you're using WordPress as a base? How do you make them sort of match nicely, integrate nicely visually? Yeah, we haven't done much deep integration. I did waste maybe like 30 hours of my life working on the RSS plugins that OMEKA can do to give an RSS feed off of OMEKA that would then create in the categories to try to make a really connected WordPress OMEKA connection. These are more done manually when we build an exhibit and saying, oh, click this link. Oh, click this link. Not like a complete... Right, it's more of a landing page with a menu item that links out to something else. And we'll talk about that strategy also later on when talking about building out domains and how we're framing and meshing digital tools together. Also keeping track of time here a little bit. We've got maybe five or six more minutes. Ed, thank you so much. Yeah, that was great, Ed, thank you. This is fantastic. And it's interesting because what Ed talked about brought some conversation up in Discord. Matt Davis is talking about them exploring OMEKA-S at Davidson College, which is super cool because I mean, I do wanna see OMEKA-S kinda come into its own because it's never... I understood that it represented a multi-site but it's cool to hear from Ed that it represents also a shared media. That really clarified some things for me because up till this point, almost any time, anyone was like, hey, I'm thinking about doing OMEKA or maybe OMEKA-S and I was like, unless you have a very specific reason you probably don't want OMEKA-S actually for a individual site, right? Because that's always been the thing. But that sharing of the library, and obviously I should have thought of this, but there's a reason they use the words, collections, and exhibits. It's... Yeah, it's... Yeah, that was... I did a little bit of work with OMEKA-S and going through it, we were doing a sort of a one-off project and I was sitting in it and going, this feels so big compared to... This is a big project, but the structure of OMEKA-S really lends itself to something even bigger. And I was sort of sitting in that and going, I'm not even sure I can picture what the best use case is for it. And so I'm really glad to be hearing from Ed and from Matt and bringing this into something that I can conceptualize better. This is really fun. I mean, it seems simple enough, right? But when Ed says, handing it off to a librarian, let them invest and then build their exhibits based on that tool or whatever, even a nice hybrid mashup of OMEKA-S and WordPress. I mean, it's a really smart thinking on his part to go at that, to recruit the right people. And it requires work, right, too. Like, you can't... Obviously that's relationship building on a campus happening and part of the fruit of that is that, you know, Ed is able to get them to conceptualize and take ownership and that's not simple, right? That work is hard. So that's really cool, but it shows that getting folks familiar with what is possible on domains can pay off in ways that you may not expect initially. And that's, you know, I know this starts off as a show and tell, but I think we're kind of getting into strategically how are we growing the community a little bit. And one of the things we've said from the beginning is finding key players that can be a voice, right? That it's not just you, but you have good key players out there doing genuine great work and that they can be a resource for others, too. And then how do you highlight that, right? Because I mean, the beauty of this is, you know, Tom and Ed are able to get on there and say, hey, here's the stuff we're doing. And then we learned from Matt Davis in the chat, hey, we're doing this at Davidson and Doug is like, we're doing this too. And I think finding those examples and finding ways to aggregate them and highlight them, you know, promoting them locally for your community is really essential to the building. Annika talked about that yesterday, like getting the examples out there and showing them, doing that is amazing. But then for us to feed back and loop back as admins to say, oh, so this was the approach you took to finally get Omega S to have a kind of, you know, to be landed in this or understand the value of gravity forms, et cetera. You know, it's a lot of work on the part of the various admins at techs, librarians, you name them. And it looks like Carla from UVA said that the UVA libraries has been exploring Omega S and WordPress for library exhibits, but still in the process of getting things sort of finalized. And I think a lot of people are sort of in that space too. So the more that we can share these resources for better and I'm really, I'm excited that Discord could potentially be the space where people could go to say, you know, what are other people doing, you know? And it's cool too, because one of the early examples I remember we would show off a lot was the work that Georgetown did around their Omega archive slavery exhibit. It's just thinking about that. Using their WordPress as a place to present those stories. It was a very interesting mashup of various tools and no one tool, every tool had its own purpose. And that's that whole small pieces loosely joined that is sometimes hard to manage. So I like Omega S as a tool that prevents maybe too much sharding off of individual omegas that then you have to update and manage kind of like WordPress multi-site. It consolidates some of that admin and overhead. And now I'm thinking actually... Sorry, I was just gonna say now I'm thinking of something that we discussed sort of in the last session, which is helping faculty build course sites that they can reuse. So in the chat, Omega S sort of works as a hub where you can reuse resources in sites that branch off of that main hub. That could be really useful for professors who want to build a new Omega site for every course that they do without having to do a lot of... Definitely. I think at this point though, it'd probably be good to wrap up. We're coming up on time, but this has been absolutely fantastic. Thanks everyone for jumping in, sharing your examples and also sharing them in the chat. I'm super excited that this has sort of set the tone for today and I'm looking forward to continuing these conversations into the next session. I think we're gonna be chatting about building out domains. So we'll see you there in a few. See you soon. Bye.