Omeka available for public download

The Center for History and New Media and the Minnesota Historical Society are pleased to announce the public beta release of Omeka, 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 and Object of History: Behind the Scenes with the Curators of the National Museum of American History. Omeka is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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, 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.
• Virginia Tech has used Omeka to collect remembrances and memorials of the sad events of last Spring, The April 16 Archive. 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
• Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
• A Look Back at Braddock District

Omeka is now available for download and includes the following features:

• Basic themes that are easy to adapt with simple CSS changes
• 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 )
• Contribution plug-in for collecting items from visitors
• COinS plug-in making all Omeka content readable by Zotero
• 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

About the Center for History & New Media

Since 1994, the Center for History and New Media has used digital media and computer technology to democratize history—to incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past. CHNM combines cutting edge digital media with the latest and best historical scholarship to promote an inclusive understanding of the past as well as broad historical literacy. CHNM maintains more than two dozen online history projects directed at diverse audiences, making them available at no cost through its website. In 2007, CHNM’s websites had 300 million hits and 10 million visitors—making it one of the busiest non-commercial history education sites on the entire World Wide Web. CHNM has been a leader both in using digital media to improve the public understanding of history and in developing innovative, easy-to-use digital tools for accessing historical content. In terms of public understanding, CHNM maintains several very popular and award-winning web-database projects, including educational projects such as History Matters, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, and World History Matters and public history projects such as the September 11 Digital Archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, and Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives. CHNM’s work has been recognized with major awards and grants from the American Historical Association, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the Department of Education, the Library of Congress, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the National Historic Records and Publication Commission, Atlantic Philanthropies, and the Sloan, Hewlett, Rockefeller, Gould, Delmas, and Kellogg foundations.

About the Minnesota Historical Society

The Minnesota Historical Society is a private, non-profit educational and cultural institution established in 1849 to preserve and share Minnesota history. The Society collects, preserves and tells the story of Minnesota’s past through interactive and engaging museum exhibits, extensive libraries and collections, 25 historic sites, educational programs and publishing. The Library, Publications and Collections Division encompasses the departments and programs that collect, preserve and provide access to historical resources through a wide variety of means. The primary area of service for the Society is the state of Minnesota, with an estimated population of just over 5.1 million people. But researchers from all over the country and the world make use of its collections, in person and, increasingly, through its web site, which hosts a number of excellent and innovative resources. For example, in FY06, over 570,000 people visited the Society’s museums and sites; the Library had over 32,000 researchers in attendance; and the web site enjoyed over 6.6 million total visits.