ThatCamp Jersey Shore: Open Source Tools

I believe this panel on open source tools was the last one on the first day. We ended up going around the room and discussing open source tools we have found useful in the classroom.

  • Joomla is a promising CMS that has many useful plugins. Someone showed one which integrates photo galleries and Google Maps.
  • There was some discussion, since we were there, of Atlantic City. The Atlantic City Experience uses Joomla.
  • AC is an easy city to forget because a lot of the living documents are gone.
  • Deborah Gussman talked about a digital edition (I can’t remember the author unfortunately…Deb?) she is working on. She wants to supplement it with political and legal documents. And wedding dresses. There was some talk that Omeka may be more useful for this.
  • A big issue we discussed was how there is no easy way to do backup on most blogging platforms. I also brought up Zotero as an example of that too. There needs to be a simpler way for non-techy users to do backup/move content.
  • Nines.org has paid and open source content. A “guest pass” can be acquired. They also fund digital humanities archives like Herman Melville’s Typpe.