The Virginia Digital Humanities Consortium, a project conceived of and begun at THATCamp Virginia last April at Virginia Tech, is now live at vadhconsortium.org.

The Virginia Digital Humanities Consortium is an informal partnership incubator and collaboration space for faculty, students, teachers, technologists, artists, designers, librarians, archivists, and museum professionals in Virginia who work in the digital humanities. The purpose of the Virginia Digital Humanities Consortium is to foster inter-institutional digital humanities collaborations: it provides a way to find Virginia partners and a place to work with them. Anyone can register for the site who lives in (or near) Virginia and works or is interested in working in the digital humanities. Features include rich member profiles where people can list, browse, and search interests, fields, skills, skill levels, and existing digital humanities projects; inter-institutional digital humanities groups with forums and collaborative documents that any member can join or create; a digital humanities events calendar; and many messaging and communication and notification options.

Sign up now, and spread the word!

Thanks to all at THATCamp Virginia who participated in the discussions about this project.

These days, any scholar or organization with a collection of primary sources such as photographs, drawings, paintings, letters, diaries, ledgers, scores, songs, oral histories, or home movies is bound to have some of this material in digital form. Omeka is a simple, free system built by and for cultural heritage professionals that is used by archives, libraries, museums, and individual scholars and teachers all over the world to create searchable online databases and attractive online exhibits of such digital archival collections. In this introduction to Omeka, we’ll look at a few of the many examples of websites built with Omeka, define some key terms and concepts related to Omeka, go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka and the open source server-side version of Omeka, and learn about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects. Participants will also learn to use Omeka themselves through hands-on exercises, so please *bring a laptop* (NOT an iPad or other tablet) if you can (if not, you can follow along with someone else). Learn more about Omeka at omeka.org and omeka.net.

Note: I’ve taught this workshop many times at various THATCamps, and my lesson plan is online for you to use at amandafrench.net/2013/11/12/introduction-to-omeka-lesson-plan/. See also how Virginia Tech’s own Special Collections uses Omeka at omeka.lib.vt.edu/.