Hot off the Presses 3: FedoraConnector Plugin

Photo by Swing Candy

For part three of our release parade, we’re showcasing the 1.0.0 release of the FedoraConnector plugin for Omeka.

Fedora Commons is a digital repository management system. It’s used by libraries to manage and scale their online repository and digital assets and collections. As such, it’s often used by larger institutions; however, this isn’t aimed at those organizations. Instead, it’s meant to be used by people who wish to pull information from institutions that use Fedora Commons.

The FedoraConnector plugin doesn’t help you discover resources in a repository. But once you have the PID for something that you’d like to include in an Omeka site, you can use that to pull in the metadata for that item, as well as any images or other content streams associated with it.

There is a little magic involved. You have to know the incantation to reach your Fedora server and you have to know how to get the PIDs for the items you’re interested in. But David McClure has worked hard to hammer out an easy, fluid workflow for getting data from Fedora into Omeka.

And once you know these things, this plugin will allow you to pull content into your Omeka site that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to: things you’ve found in your library catalogue and wished you could include, but didn’t know how.

You can download the plugin on the FedoraConnector plugin page. The code is on the github repository. If you have feedback, complaints, or feature requests, visit the issues page. And if you have any questions, feel free to post to the Omeka forums.