I am a history teacher. I have created an Omeka site with the Curatescape theme for my students to present local history. Next year, my students will be transcribing a series of Civil War enlistment records. I would like for them to be able to attach an image of the record to their transcription. I would like for them to be able to manipulate the data, examine patterns, averages, etc. I could have them simply use a spreadsheet, but it isn’t really optimal.
I noticed that Reclaim offers the SQL tool. Is that the route I should take? Does it allow the generation of reports, allow calculations, allow the data to be searchable from a front end on the Omeka site?
phpMyAdmin is built into cPanel, but not effective when you’ve got multiple students working together since cPanel has yet to build any user management to allow multiple folks access there. My suggestion would be to have the students using an external tool like Sequel Pro connected to a Reclaim database. See Database management in cPanel for more info on remote management of databases. MySQL Workbench is another popular tool. Omeka should be able to communicate with anything in the database but depending on the structure and what you’re doing might require custom development. I would shoot any specifics of what you’re thinking in terms of an Omeka integration on their forums for guidance on that piece http://forum.omeka.org/
Thanks. I’ll check those out.
Omeka does seem to have an API now. If teaching SQL skills isn’t an objective that might give you some additional options for getting at the manipulation of data without the necessity of SQL commands overhead.