Greetings,
Below you will find some information announcing the public beta release of
the Center for History and New Media's latest software project, Omeka
(http://omeka.org) -- the free and open-source software that provides
museums, historical societies, libraries and individuals with an easy to use
platform for publishing collections and creating attractive,
standards-based, interoperable online exhibits.
We're very excited about the software and building a strong community of
users and developers, and we hope that some of you decide to download it and
try working with it at your institution.
We are very interested in feedback, so please send an email
([log in to unmask]) or log into our Forums to comment and discuss your
experiences with Omeka.
Thanks for your time.
Sheila A. Brennan
Senior Digital History Associate
Center for History and New Media
George Mason University
703-879-8366
[log in to unmask]
http://chnm.gmu.edu
The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the
Minnesota Historical Society are pleased to announce the public beta release
of Omeka <omeka.org>, the free and open-source software that provides
museums, historical societies, libraries and individuals with an easy-to-use
platform for publishing collections and creating attractive,
standards-based, interoperable online exhibits. Omeka is designed to satisfy
the needs of cultural institutions that lack technical staffs and large
budgets. Bringing Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to small museum,
historical society, and library websites, Omeka fosters the kind of user
interaction and participation that is central to the mission of those
cultural institutions. Omeka's development is the result of ten years of
digital public history work, experimentation, and technology development on
projects such as The September 11 Digital Archive <911digitalarchive.org>
and Object of History: Behind the Scenes with the Curators of the National
Museum of American History <objectofhistory.org>. Omeka is funded by the
Institute of Museum and Library Services <imls.gov> and the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation <sloan.org>.
The theme-switching process and plug-in architecture at the heart of Omeka
will be familiar to users who are accustomed to working with popular
blogging software, but Omeka includes a number of features that are directed
specifically at public history users and other humanists. First, the system
functions using an archive built on a Dublin Core metadata scheme, allowing
it to be interoperable with existing content management systems and all
other Omeka installations. Second, Omeka includes a process for building
narrative exhibits with flexible layouts. These two features alone provide
cultural institutions with the power to increase their web presence and to
showcase the interpretive expertise of curators, archivists, and historians.
But Omeka's plug-in architecture also allows users to do much more to extend
their exhibits to include maps, timelines, and folksonomies, and it provides
the "hooks" and APIs (application programming interfaces) that open-source
developers and designers need to add additional functionality to suit their
own institutions' particular needs. In turn, a public plug-ins and themes
directory will allow these community developers to donate their new tools
back to the rest of Omeka users. The Omeka team is eager to build a large
and robust community of open-source developers around this suite of
technologies.
Available in private beta since September, Omeka has already accrued over
150 test users, and a number of successful projects are using the software:
The Light Factory and Cultural Heritage & Museums in South Carolina
are using Omeka for an online collecting site to accompany their physical
show, River Docs <http://www.catawbariverdocs.com/>, in which contemporary
artists documented their personal interactions with the Catawaba River over
the course of a year. Omeka has enabled the curators to collect images and
reflections from the public, extending the reach of the physical exhibit and
deepening the connection of the visitors to the project.
The New York Public Library is testing Omeka for an online overview
of its most popular collections, Treasures of the New York Public Library
<http://labs.nypl.org/labs-projects/exhibits/>.
Virginia Tech has used Omeka to collect remembrances and memorials
of the sad events of last Spring, The April 16 Archive
<april16archive.org>. Omeka's flexible design and architecture enabled the
launch of this site within days of the tragic shootings.
Other projects using Omeka include:
Object of History: Behind the Scenes with the Curators at the
National Museum of American History <objectofhistory.org>
Hurricane Digital Memory Bank <hurricanearchive.org>
A Look Back at Braddock District <braddockheritage.org>
Omeka is now available for download <omeka.org/download/> and includes the
following features:
Basic themes that are easy to adapt with simple CSS changes (more
themes available at <omeka.org/download/themes/>)
Exhibit building with 12 basic page layouts
Tagging for items and exhibits
RSS feed for new items
Drop box plug-in for batch adding items (available at
<omeka.org/download/plugins/>)
Contribution plug-in for collecting items from visitors
COinS plug-in making all Omeka content readable by Zotero
<zotero.org>
Geolocation plug-in for displaying items on a map
Bilingual plug-in for adding language fields to item metadata
Site notes plug-in for administrators to leave instructions for
users
System Requirements:
Linux operating system
Apache server (with mod_rewrite enabled)
MySQL 5.0 or greater
PHP 5.2.x or greater
ImageMagick
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