This semester, I’ve been working on adding a database to the Virtual Titular Head website containing information about the films exhibited through the years at the film festival. The goal of this work is to have a functional tool by the end of March. We want people to able to reminisce on and learn more about these films.

We have decided to use Omeka to implement this database to the website. We want to use the Big Picture theme, as the focus on images matches the visual nature of the festival. The website can be accessed at https://titularhead.sites.grinnell.edu/, and the database at https://database.titularhead.sites.grinnell.edu/

We are working with a collection of films categorized by year and sparse metadata about them in the form of yearly databases including information such as the title, collaborators, and runtime of each film. The good thing about Omeka is it allows CSV imports to make the process of adding info to the database quicker. However, sometimes I’ve encountered obscure error messages with no context of what went wrong. This is one of the trickier things about Omeka to me: it’s not as straightforward as WordPress when it comes to editing or adding to the website, you have to do a lot of things through C-panel or go to the source code, from what I read online. The other trouble I’ve faced is accessing the archive with the movies, as it is a very (understandably) secured folder and I don’t have all the admin permissions.

My next steps are to add to the documentation I’ve created, successfully add a folder’s worth of films and metadata to the Omeka database, share my progress with Adam to get feedback, and so on. I’m still curious about how we are going to handle the missing data and who we are going to attribute to, giving the practical complications.