1. Location for Morningside Workshop meetings
The group agreed that these will be held in our Digital Humanities Center on scheduled Tuesdays 10-11. The computers there have big screens conducive to working on exhibits. They also have the full range of software we might want to use.
2. Map color scheme for site home page
Anice was the only member of Design Team in attendance at this meeting. She was asked to let the Design Team know that they should hold a meeting within the next couple of weeks. The group had decided at our last meeting, and in subsequent emails on our Developing Librarian email list, that the map featured on our site home page should follow the original color scheme of the historical map, with some modification allowed for darkening in PhotoShop to make colors and shapes stand out more sharply. This will call for a rethinking of the entire color scheme of the home page and the wire frame used for it. Design team needs to select colors from paletton.com that harmonize with the colors on the map and then to provide the color codes to the Development Team. Our current version of the map, as darkened by Anice and Bob and approved by the group, is accessible in Google Drive in the MHDH Logos folder. The Design Team should feel free to modify brightness and contrast for optimal appearance of map.
3. Update from Development Team regarding transition to latest version of Omeka
This was handled by Alex and went smoothly. Alex pointed out that Omeka does not automatically transfer Omeka sites to the latest version of the software. He also advised that we should not feel any need to migrate our site to the latest version of Omeka every time a new version comes out. We migrated from the earlier version in which our site was first created to a much later version in this instance mainly because the earlier version contained a serious bug. Migration of a site to a new version of Omeka can involve risks, so any decisions about migration need to be carefully considered.
4. Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition)
Anice asked the group on behalf of the editorial team what it thought of John’s suggestion that the project should follow Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition) for citation style. The group agreed to this. Advantages to Chicago Manual pointed out were: it deals clearly with a very wide variety of formats; and it is a style often recommended by history journals.
5. Recap of issues that have lately surfaced on our Developing Librarian email list
a. People might wish in the creation of their exhibit pages to include hyperlinks taking users to item files that have been saved in our Omeka project site, but that are not directly incorporated into the page in question. Creating a hyperlink, using the url that appears when the item in question is fullscreen in our Omeka site, will have the desired effect–for now only. Such links should be recognized as “absolute” links: they take the user to a specific item on a specific server. Once our site has moved to a Columbia University Libraries server, all such absolute links will need to be revised. It is also possible to create “relative” links, which are more based on the orientation of one item in relation to another. These would stay valid even after our project moves to a new server. Overall, people seemed to feel that the simplest approach would be to stick with absolute links, keep track of where they are used, and be prepared to revise them when site moves to new server.
b. No substantial discussion was devoted to the following topic. So the minutes will simply relate what was decided in email. When faced with the choice of uploading a file as an item to our Omeka site as either JPG or PDF, we should choose JPG, even for text files. JPG files are considerably smaller and this decreases load time for site users. Load time is a key issue that influences user satisfaction with the usability of a site.
6. Assignment due Tuesday March 24
Each group member was asked to create an exhibit page featuring at least one item along with draft text. All were referred to examples of exhibit pages already created by group members on our Omeka project site.
7. Editorial issues
We are all a bit unclear about how to fill out the fields that appear in the Dublin Core template when we upload item files to our Omeka project site. For now we are all simply following our best guess. In March and April we will be turning to the Editorial Team for substantial further guidance.
