Is DIVINER right for you?

Ask yourself these questions - if you answer yes to 3 or more of them, DIVINER might be what you’re looking for!

 

Materials

  • Do you have a project with more the 100 individual pieces of media (photo, video, audio)?

  • Do you want to share these pieces as an archive with the public?

  • Can you think of ways to search through your data?

 

Tech Needs

  • Can you (or someone in your organization or company) devote considerable time to customizing an archive and uploading your media?

  • Does that person have experience with WordPress. If not, are they willing to learn? Though we outline in detail the steps required to install and configure DIVINER, it is not a turn-key solution, and because it is customizable, requires very thoughtful set-up.

 

Potential Use Cases

Museums, historical associations, or libraries who have digitized either their whole collection, or subsets of their collection, and wish to make those digital files (photos, photos of objects, documents, videos) available to the public. DIVINER may be considered a simpler Wordpress friendly alternative to Omeka.

Humanities Organizations who wish to share special projects for which they have amassed a large amount of materials

Public Media Stations who wish to aggregate reporting on a certain theme or topic

Here are a couple of example DIVINER projects:

  • Photo project collecting images of work from around a region of New York State
  • Historical photo archive of a 20th century farm
  • Media archive for a years-long project documenting the movement of Columbian immigrants, including photos, video, and personal written testimony
  • Repository for federal court cases concerning the topic of imprisoning minors
  • Audio archive of short nature sounds, to be used by a nature center when they are creating new displays

 

Technology Ecosystem

Currently Diviner is comprised of two active projects, a Wordpress plugin and a Wordpress theme.

Wordpress Diviner Archive Plugin

https://wordpress.org/plugins/diviner-archive/

The plugin includes all the functionality necessary for building out an archive with multifacet search. The plugin created a archive item custom post type and adds an administrative tool to the Wordpress backend for managing your fields. It also allows you to drop in a shortcde ([diviner_browse_page]) for outputting the real time browse experience. This plugin may be used with any theme.

 

Wordpress Diviner Archive Theme

https://wordpress.org/themes/diviner-archive/

The responsive theme has several widget areas, two templates, and customizations options for fonts and colors. It works well with the diviner archive plugin or on its own.

 

Standalone Combined Theme

Prior to the release of these two active projects available on wordpress.org, a standalone theme was developed to include all the functionality of the above plugin. With features like pre-poluating of browse and home pages, custom blocks, and a widget for displaying select archive items, this theme was a turnkey solution for anyone looking to start an archive project. This standalone theme only exists as tagged releases from github and may not be updated much in the future.

https://github.com/NCPR/diviner-wp-archive-theme/releases/tag/1.0.2

 

In the Wild

Here’s an incomplete list of projects already using Diviner.

  1. Miner Institute: http://whminerarchives.org/diviner-browse/
  2. North Country At Work: https://northcountryatwork.org
  3. Clinton County Historical Association: http://photos.clintoncountyhistorical.org/diviner-browse/