Syncing Omeka with Fedora Commons Cole Hudson Wayne State University I’m here to talk about how a colleague and I wrote a series of scripts that allows us to batch ingest content from Fedora Commons repository to Omeka and keep it in sync. 1

We Had This 1700~ objects Metadata Images Located in a Fedora Commons Collection So, here’s what we had. We had 1700-ish objects with metadata and images located in a FC collection. Had preservation copies on FC and a group wanted these images displayed through an interface. We wanted to use Omeka to build this interface and didn’t need to put tiffs on there, but we somehow needed to transfer smaller access versions onto Omeka in stance. 2

Fedora Commons Omeka Bridging the Gap Metadata Images So my question here was how can I batch import a collection from FC to Omeka, keep it reasonably in sync, and not have to hack either system? 3

Here’s One Way Export all your objects’ DC Batch convert Fedora DC into CSV Upload CSV Use Fedora Connector to link each item separately. So we looked around and saw one way you could do this. You can export all of the DC in the collection you want to put into FC. Then batch convert all that DC into the CSV that Omeka will accept. After you upload that to Omeka, though, the kicker is that you have to use an existing Omeka plugin (Fedora Connector) and individually link each item separately. That would take quite a long time. 4

Yeah, No We didn’t do this. Hence, we didn’t do this. We wanted something that would make this CSV creation process faster and syncing with FC less time intensive. 5

Enter PyFedMon Ugly Name, but a beautiful series of scripts Written in Python and PHP Makes Syncing content between Omeka and FC easy So, what’d we do? We wrote up some code to make that happen. What we have now is a program called PyFedMon(Python Fedora Monitor) which is a series of scripts written in Python and PHP which makes batch ingesting content into Omeka and syncing it with Fedora really easy. 6

Here’s Our Way Identify our collection of objects Run CSV Creator script Upload CSV to Omeka So, I’ll run really quickly through our process. After we’ve identified our collection from Fedora, all we have to do is ran our custom CSV creator script with gives us a CSV we upload to Omeka. Run CSV Creator script which generates a CSV of FC PIDs and placeholder metadata Upload CSV to Omeka—this gives you the structure you need in Omeka 7

This is what we get (times 1700) This is what we get (times 1700). Which is a fake picture with a fake title, but an identiifer that matches up with a Fedora PID for each image in that Fedora collection. That identifier is basically the key here. 8

Here’s Our Way--Continued Run Omeka/Fedora Sync Which monitors the Fedora Logs for changes to your Fedora Commons collection A Listener on Omeka-side transforms content sent by FC Finally, all we do is run our Omeka/Fedora Sync program, which pushes out all the relevant images and metadata over to Omeka and a listener on the Omeka side takes anything sent its way and transforms into access copies and imports it automatically into Omeka. Finally, it monitors the Fedora logs for any changes to your Omeka collection in the future. 9

Now this here saves a copy of the images and metadata to your Omeka instance, so it’s not simply displaying remote Fedora datastreams. It’s actually displaying the content it now has saved locally. 10

DONE! And you're done! 11

Implications Please Steal This Lightweight, requires no hacking of Omeka, Omeka Plugins, or Fedora Commons So, here’s what you can do if you like what you hear. Please use it. This requires no hackery, it’s a series of scripts that sit beside your FC and Omeka instances. 12

Questions? Cole Hudson Find the code on Github Digital Publishing Librarian Wayne State University Cole.Hudson@wayne.edu @colehud Find the code on Github https://github.com/WSULib/pyFedMon And that’s it. If you have any question, come find me at the conference or shoot me an email. Either I or Graham will be happy to answer them. Here’s the code on Github. Thanks! 13

Credits Thumbs Up by Paolo Camera. CC BY 2.0. http://www.flickr.com/photos/vegaseddie/5700609302/ Graham Hukill—who helped write this code 14