Contributor information

I am creating a local history page for my community. I am a high school teacher and created an account for each of my students. I had several photos to upload, so I pushed out 10 or so photos to each student to make light work of the process. After they were finished, I found that many had inappropriate tags, titles, etc. I don’t mind making the minor changes. It is an easy process.

Here is my problem: I had them credit the local historic preservation community for the photos, so their names are not associated with the item. Is there a way for me to locate which account added an item? If it helps, they added the item through the admin window rather than the contributor page.

I am really new to this, so sorry if this has been asked before.

This doesn’t look like it works retroactively, but History Log might get you the information more easily going forward.

An immediate, if awkward work around might be to install the Reassign Ownership plugin. It has little testing, so it’s not among the official plugins on omeka.org. But when it’s installed, when you edit an item it shows the current owner in the dropdown for changing ownership.

Hope that helps

Thanks. I’ll take a look at the History Log plug in. To be perfectly honest, I can get around it by having them contribute their items through the contribute page. That way, I can see the item contributor info from the admin window. I didn’t realize I could add more fields to the contributor page.

Is it possible to limit a contributor to only be able to add through the contributor page and not the admin window?

In general, I’m a big fan of not duplicating work, and what you are aiming toward sounds like duplication, if data has already been supplied. Redoing submissions via Contribution sounds like a lot of redoing work, both for you and for your students. So, I’m looking for options to minimize that.

I looked again at the Reassign Ownership plugin on my dev installation, and it looks like it could do the work you are looking for. It’ll show the owner on the item edit page. Not perfect, but seems pretty close since you already have data entered, and users created.

The data connecting the user to the item is stored in the database, just not really displayed well (this has come up before)

To the last question, the distinction between contributor page and admin window can get complicated when anyone has a user account in Omeka. To avoid confusion, it’s best to keep people in one process/workflow. Sounds like students already have access to the admin side, so I’d recommend keeping the workflow based on that.

I agree. I am not a fan of doubling up the work, but I teach high school and their contributions need to be proofed and edited anyway. I had one student who described a photo simply as “funeral.” It was a photo of a local Congressman with LBJ and Truman in the background…kind of a big deal for our tiny town.

They have uploaded about 80 images, so it won’t be terribly difficult. Although I am sure you are correct about the Reassign Ownership plugin, as a novice with Omeka, I am a little concerned about an untested plugin. I know just enough to be dangerous and I would rather not goof up what I have accomplished. What risks might be involved?

OK, I just added the History Log plugin. That will help a lot. At least I can get a feel for what the students are doing. It might be a little information overload though. What I would really like to see is the user field on the Items tab instead of creator. Sure, in many cases, it should be the same, but the creator element is manually entered and doesn’t necessarily mean that is who added the item.

Thanks for taking time out of your day to have this dialogue with me. I am new to this and really need someone with experience to bounce ideas off of.

No problem. I appreciate the concerns. In this case, though, I think you’re looking at giving the Reassign Ownership plugin a try; writing new code yourself; or looking through your assignments to align students with items submitted. It won’t alter the items/browse page, but will show the info on the edit page.

The plugin isn’t really tested, but for your purposes it seems okay. You’d just be using it to display information, not write information back to the database, so it’s a much safer usage. If it were writing data back, I’d be more concerned, but for this I think it’s the quickest approach to your needs and is pretty safe.
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