Matthew McKinley transitioning from CDL to Omeka

Our colleague Matthew McKinley has accepted the role of Full-Stack Developer with Omeka, which provides open-source web publishing platforms for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibits. He will be working with a team of colleagues primarily centered in Fairfax, VA to support the core Omeka Classic and Omeka-S software, as well a range of modules and plug-ins designed for those systems.

Matthew joined the CDL almost exactly four years ago as the Metadata Harvest Programmer in what was then the Digital Special Collections team (now the Publishing, Archives, and Digitization Group), transitioning from his previous role as a Digital Project Specialist at the UC Irvine Libraries. While at CDL, Matthew significantly advanced our harvesting activities through a multi-year project supported with LSTA funding (“Harvesting California’s Bounty”), administered by the California State Library, spurring a growth in the breadth and depth of content available through Calisphere. He has worked with a broad range of cultural heritage organizations throughout California to make their collections more widely available through Calisphere (and subsequently, DPLA). This includes many public libraries, academic libraries, and numerous institutions represented through large-scale collaborations such as California Revealed. Matthew has been instrumental in establishing an operational harvesting workflow, while refining our codebase and extending it to support a broader range of contributors’ systems such as Omeka, Flickr, Islandora, PastPerfect, and YouTube. Matthew’s efforts have helped to dramatically increase the number of publicly available items in Calisphere, reaching the one million mark two years ago and climbing to almost 1.8 million as of the end of August this year. We will miss Matthew’s talent and expertise, timely and well-crafted Calisphere social media posts, and good humor and wit — but we’re glad that we’ll be able to continue working with him in other digital library contexts.

Matthew’s last day at CDL is September 30, 2020. Until then, he will be working on a part-time basis at both CDL and Omeka. While we are sad to see Matthew go, we are excited that he is joining a partner organization and are looking forward to collaborating with him in the future. Please join us in wishing Matthew well on this exciting next step in his career, and thanking him for his contributions to CDL, UC, and cultural heritage organizations throughout the state.