KORA: Multimedia Repository
KORA is an open-source, database-driven, online digital repository application for complex multimedia objects (text, images, audio, video) created by MATRIX. The application ingests, manages, and delivers digital objects with corresponding metadata that enhances the research and educational value of the objects. KORA’s flexible architecture can accommodate any metadata scheme allowing for individualized digital collections with differing contents and metadata structures.
Metadata elements are created through a point and click interface in which users select the metadata element, and then define specific attributes and parameters for that element. Example attributes include data type and user-interface customizations (i.e., required formats for data such as date, email validation, URL formatting, etc.), whether the element is required for each record, whether it should appear in search returns, and other features. After this design phase, ingestion (i.e. data entry) forms and management tools for each metadata scheme are then generated automatically.
Because the back-end of projects can be created in minutes by people without technical training, the overhead of getting projects started is reduced immeasurably compared to beginning with a blank SQL or other database. Also, KORA can ingest materials from any standardized repository and can output XML that can be harvested by these repositories.
KORA provides the cultural heritage community with important benefits for delivering content from online repositories. It allows content area experts and researchers to develop content for the web without web application technology being a major stumbling block. And because KORA is an online application, it supports the distributed development of collections where multiple users can enter data and develop the same resource from separate locations at the same time.
KORA provides users with an easy to use web publishing platform that allows administrators to create complex web displays that may combine a variety of media types.
Latest release of KORA on sourceforge.
Sample KORA Sites
South Africa: Overcoming Apartheid Building Democracy – This educational website provides primary source materials, newly-written narrative, and curriculum ideas for teaching high school and undergraduate students about the many generations who struggled to end apartheid and build democracy in South Africa.
American Black Journal – Originally titled Colored People’s Time, went on the air in 1968 as a televised public forum for black citizens during a historic moment of racial turmoil across the nation. This website is part of a long term collaboration between Detroit Public Television and Michigan State University to preserve and present the crucial and historic materials of the American Black Journal television program.
Explore PA History – A rich collection of stories from history, lesson plans, historical markers, and related materials about Pennsylvania, past and present.
The Quilt Index – An international collaborative project displaying more than 50,000 quilt images from more than 25 institutions with carefully-designed metadata about them that can be searched or browsed in many ways (collection, style, state of origin, purpose, date created, etc.)
Community Video Education Trust – A digital archive of unique videos shot in the Cape Town area of South Africa during the late 1980s and early 1990s. More than 150 pieces of streaming video document anti-apartheid demonstrations, speeches, mass funerals, celebrations, and interviews with activists.
