Leaning on my work in my M.A. Thesis, I have created a gallery of Merovingian material culture for my Omeka Exhibit. I’ve noticed when speaking with members of the public (or even academics not directly involved in Late Antiquity) that most appear to believe that the collapse of Roman authority in the 5th Century was the end of nearly all cultural and economic activity in Europe for some time. This exhibit demonstrates that to be untrue, displaying some of the surviving items being created during that period.
My first step was tracking down the items I would use and putting them into Omeka with their metadata. I drew my initial items from the American Library of Congress, which has in turn been supplied a number of digital items by the National Library of France, but all but one item were manuscripts. I included a few of these books but wanted a more diverse spread of material culture for the exhibit.
The British Museum turned out to be a good source for Merovingian items, perhaps unsurprisingly. Many, while catalogued, had no digital images available, but there were still plenty of options available. The British Museum also has a standardized format for citation and use of their images, which was remarkably helpful.
Once all of the items were in order, I got them set up into a unified collection and began working on my exhibit. I decided to split it into three sections: a combined Introduction & Rationale, a Guide, and a Gallery for the images themselves.
I did notice at this point that I had forgotten to set my items to public view and had to go back to do so. Thankfully, the editing process was fairly painless.
Once the exhibit itself was in good shape, I looked into ADA accessibility. There were some limitations inherent to the subject I was working with since the exhibit was of still images of material culture. The captions describe the items as best as possible, but relatively little information is available on some of the images. Beyond that, no part of the site relies on color coding and color contrast appears to be in good shape.