Digital Archive Assignment

If touching the thumbnail doesn’t work, then the link is here: https://omeka.lateantiquityfan.com/.

For this assignment, we were supposed to set up a digital archive using the web creation program Omeka S. Said website was supposed to include an exhibit that included at least five items relating to Mundelein College. It took me a while to set up everything, but I eventually did. When it comes to working with computers, I’m decent at doing the basic stuff, the real problem is with polishing. The omeka site has everything the assignment requested, but I ran into trouble when it came to actually polishing my site. In my search to figure out how to get thumbnails to show up on my archive, I found myself having to look through multiple forums in order to even get a semblance of an idea of what to do. Imagine my shock when I found out that there was no way that image directory could be installed without hard coding. I’m terrible at coding! I haven’t tried it since high school when I almost failed a basic coding class in my freshman year. But, for the sake of the assignment, I decided to try again.

That was a mistake.

I don’t know what I did, but I must have done something when looking through the files of my Omeka domain, because shortly thereafter, my control panel was unable to redirect to the admin page. I searched for hours for a way to fix it, but the only possible solution I could find was getting rid of my internet cookies. I tried that, but it only made it worse. By then, it was half past nine and I had been working on this for more or less five hours. I checked back today and I still am not able to get to the admin page. I fear the ability to access that page may be lost forever.

So, I cut my losses and just resigned myself to have a plain Jane type digital archive. Again, everything that the assignment required it to have is still on the page, and the public page can still be accessed. I’ll just have to be content with it looking not so pretty.

Throughout the course of this class, I’ve gained a new appreciation for digital and graphic designers. The amount of dumb coding things that you need to do in order to make a website or panel look like it wasn’t constructed for a freshman mid-term project is actually a lot harder than it looks; furthermore, the more I attempt to stretch my horizons, the more I fear I fly too close to the sun. Stick to what you know, I guess. That’s probably why the Humanities has had such a hard time digitizing, as up until about 5-10 years ago there simply weren’t enough people that had the skills required to begin the digitization process.