The Visual Bibliotheca

Hello, 

My name is Anton Hodge, currently a rising senior majoring in Public Humanities with a minor in History. Last academic year(2025-26), I was a student worker in the Merrick Archives, and this fall (Fall 2026, it is July as I write) I will be an academic intern for the semester as I work on my senior comp---the history of transit infrastructure development in Pennsylvania, from 1800 to the introduction of the Interstate Highway System. Feel free to email follow up questions about this project to hodge01@allegheny.edu.

Basic Process

This project was assembled through a multi-step process which ideally will be easily replicatable in the future, to expand this project to more archival materials. The basic process is as follows;

1. Examine the collection and decide on a theme. For the first instance of this project, it was religious themed, to incorporate oversized materials and the oldest printed items as sub-goals. It should be advised, this initial survey will inevitably be larger than scope allows. That's fine. This initial group to my project was 108 items, and the final result was 80. I highly reccomend taking advantage of access opportunity to flip through and read a bunch, this is the fun part.

2. Pictures. There are two main methods in the Merrick Archives, a proper scanner and, as it is 2026, your phone, I will assume you have one with a camera. The scanner is a great tool to capture incredibly high quality images. However, in the course of capturing the initial group, it became evident that the average phone camera is a more effective tool due to ease of use and working around the handling conditions of the books themselves. A critical restraint in using the scanner is that the books need to stay open themselves, and lay flat, which many of them won't do. My phone camera as of writing this is eight years old and it was good enough for this project. 
 

3. Uploading to Omeka. The basic mechanism to do this, is to transfer the pictures to the computer, I used my school email, sending an email to myself from my phone as a transfer mechanism. Then organize the pictures to a proper  folder scheme. I had one large folder for the project as a whole, with individual book folders each holding 2-7 pictures per book within. Afterwards, bluntly, there's a large amount of rote work, which is not interesting or exciting, but must be done. Life is like that sometimes, I reccomend Paramore. The basic process of Omeka webpage constuction is as follows; 1. Create an item. 2. Upload an image. If it is the Title page, fill in the mapping location and date fields. 3. Do this again for other pages in the same book. 3. Create a new page. The basic structure which I have used for this is, from top of the page to the bottom, Title field ( Year of publication - book title), HTML block, Line break (clear), HTML block, and then the 'Item Carousel' function. The HTML blocks are purely for plaintext.

Adding the Mapping locaiton and date fields to the title page item of a book page will automatically add the new Title page item to the Map webpage and the date field will insert it into the Timeline webpage.

HTML and Omeka Functions

HTML webcoding is largely unnecessary for most Omeka functions. The HTML block auto-sets to plaintext typing.

Accessing the source information is accessible through clicking the 'source' button above the text settings when the HTML block is selected. If you are continuing this project, the only time you ever need to touch that is when messing with the Welcome page. In short, select one section from the source text, and then for any page, copy the website address into the space after "href-=", and then open the inspect element while on the book page being added, copy the image webaddress, and copy that into the space after "src=". Then, copy that entire block into the HTML block with all the other welcome page books and it should just work. If nothing I just said makes any sense, email Librarian Andrew Miller.

The map tool in Omeka is a little janky. To get to a book page from the Omeka Map tool, you need to go to the item, and then the book page from there, which is unintuitive. If there is one thing I would reccomend replacing, it would be that. 

Acknowledgements-

Professor Brian Miller Supervised the Summer 2026 iteration of this project.

Special Collections Librarian and Head Archivist Christopher Anderson was a great help in religious history and materials access.

Librarian Andrew Miller made using Omeka and understanding its functions possible. This webpage would not exist in this fashion without his assistance.

An additional thank you to Professor Paula Burleigh for loaning me an art textbook.