MATC awards recognize not-for-profit organizations that are making substantial contributions of their own resources toward the development of open source software and the fostering of collaborative communities to sustain open source development.

Omeka is a free and open source web publishing platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, educators and cultural enthusiasts. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural web sites to foster user interaction and participation. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability.

“Until now, scholars and cultural heritage professionals looking to publish collections-based research and online exhibitions required either extensive technical skills or considerable funding for outside vendors,” said Tom Scheinfeldt, project co-lead and managing director of CHNM. “By making standards-based, serious online publishing easy, Omeka puts the power and reach of the web in the hands of academics and cultural professionals themselves.”

Scheinfeldt accepted the award from Vinton Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, who chaired the blue-ribbon prize committee. The committee also included Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web; John Gage, chief researcher and director of the Science Office at Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation; Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media; John Seely Brown, former chief scientist at Xerox Corp.; Ira Fuchs, vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and Donald J. Waters, program officer in the Program in Scholarly Communication at the Mellon Foundation.

CHNM is also re-launching the project website, http://omeka.org, with a new look. The new design showcases a diverse range of Omeka-powered websites and encourages involvement from the open-source development and user community.

Scholars and cultural heritage professionals no longer need extensive technical skills or expensive systems to publish collections-based research and online exhibitions. They only need Omeka.

Omeka is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

Omeka 0.10b Features

• Free and open source publishing suite for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, and cultural enthusiasts
• Unqualified Dublin Core structure is interoperable with existing digital collections systems.
• W3C, 508 standards compliant
• Improved exhibit building
Element sets for institution-specific metadata sets
• Web 2.0 functionality: Syndicate content with RSS/ATOM feeds; tag items with keywords; personalize favorite items; invite users to share in content creation.
• Plugins: geolocation, bi-lingual sites, user-created content, document browsing, batch uploading, or build one to suit project needs.
• Themes: easily choose, modify, or build your own site design.
• Data migration tools: Coming soon for popular content management systems

Selected Websites Built with Omeka

• Making the History of 1989, Center for History and New Media
• Eminent Domain, New York Public Library
• Bracero History Archive, Center for History and New Media, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Brown University, and the Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas at El Paso
• Upper Ringwood Collections, Ringwood Public Library, New Jersey
• Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, Center for History and New Media, Gulag Museum at Perm 36, and International Memorial Society
• Pictures of the Year International Archive, Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri School of Journalism

The Thomson Reuters Corporation has sued the Commonwealth of Virginia over Zotero, a project based at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). A free and open-source software initiative, Zotero aims to create the world’s best research tool and has already been adopted by hundreds of thousands of users at countless colleges and research universities. CHNM announces that it has re-released the full functionality of Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview to its users and the open source community.

As part of its formal response to this legal action, Mason will also not renew its site license for EndNote. As academics themselves, the creators of the Zotero project strive to serve the scholarly community and to respond to its needs in an age of digital research. In line with that simple goal, they maintain that anything created by users of Zotero belongs to those users, and that it should be as easy as possible for Zotero users to move to and from the software as they wish, without friction. CHNM concurs with the journal Nature, which recently editorialized about this matter: “The virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating.”

CHNM remains committed to the openness it has promoted since its founding at Mason in 1994 and to the freedoms of users of its websites and software. Its ambitious development cycle and plans for Zotero’s future remain unchanged. CHNM will continue to develop and implement new research technologies in the pursuit of better ways to create and share scholarship. CHNM greatly appreciates the many supportive comments it has received from scholars, librarians, and administrators around the globe.

The first grant will provide CHNM with funding for a thorough survey of the use of cell phones, Blackberries, iPods, and other mobile devices in art museums. Based on the survey’s findings, the project will produce a white paper of concrete recommendations on how best to use these new technologies to engage visitors with visual art objects and a set of rough prototypes or proofs of concept based on these recommendations.

The second project will produce a set of three plugins for the Omeka web publishing platform geared specifically to the needs of art historians and art museums. The first of these plugins will extend Omeka’s data model to accommodate the emerging CDWA Lite (Categories for the Description of Works of Art Lite) metadata standard, which is gaining widespread adoption among the art museum community. The second will utilize Omeka’s built-in RSS feeds to allow any visitor to an Omeka website to view a museum’s collection in “slide show” or “3D” mode using the popular and visually striking Cooliris software. The third plugin will afford visitors to Omeka websites the ability to annotate and label images and share those annotations with friends, colleagues, and classmates.

The new partnership with Kress underscores CHNM’s broad commitment to digital history and humanities, increasing the Center’s formal engagement with art and art history and pushing scholarly and museum technology in new directions.

Stay tuned to the THATCamp blog for a more formal announcement and application guidelines.

WordCamp Ed builds on the success of last spring’s THATCamp, reinforcing CHNM’s growing importance as a gathering place for the educational and cultural technology communities.

In October 2007, the U.S. Department of Education awarded a $7 million contract, if fully funded over five years, to CHNM, in partnership with Stanford University, the American Historical Association, and the National History Center. The online project focuses on historical thinking and learning and is designed to help K-12 history teachers become more effective educators, thereby expanding student knowledge of U.S. history and its relevance to their daily lives and future. The clearinghouse provides links to the most informative and comprehensive history content on the Internet. It also provides teaching tools and resources such as lesson plan reviews, guides to working with primary sources and models of exemplary classroom teaching. The clearinghouse will link to a number of national history education organizations and associations. The website is interactive, allowing teachers to ask questions, comment on topical issues and share information on what and how they teach.

“The National History Education Clearinghouse will put into the hands of any teacher with an Internet connection the highest quality materials for teaching U.S. history,” says Sam Wineburg, professor and chair of curriculum and teacher education at Stanford and executive producer and senior scholar of the clearinghouse. “We are honored to be part of the digital revolution that is changing history teaching.”

The clearinghouse is funded under Teaching American History (TAH), a federally funded program created to raise student achievement by improving teachers’ knowledge and understanding of traditional U.S. history. TAH has funded more than 800 projects across the country since 2001.

“We are thrilled to play such a prominent role in helping K-12 U.S. history teachers and in bringing together the many communities involved in history education,” says Kelly Schrum, director of educational projects at CHNM and clearinghouse project co-director. “The Teaching American History program and the clearinghouse demonstrate the federal government’s dedication to improving history education, and we know that the clearinghouse will continue to improve and educate as it develops.”

The website, co-directed by Schrum and Sharon Leon at CHNM, and Daisy Martin at Stanford, is organized around seven features: history education news, history content, teaching materials, best practices, issues and research, professional development and Teaching American History grants. The clearinghouse uses the latest advances in digital technology to explore history teaching through interactive images as well as audio clips and videos of classroom teaching and historians discussing primary sources.

Offline support will include a yearly conference, a newsletter and an annual report on the state of history education in the United States.

About the Center for History and New Media

Since 1994, the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University 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 and democratic understanding of the past as well as broad historical literacy. CHNM’s work has been recognized with major awards and grants from the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, the Library of Congress, and the Sloan, Mellon, Hewlett, Rockefeller, Gould, Delmas and Kellogg foundations.

About George Mason University

George Mason University, located in the heart of Northern Virginia’s technology corridor near Washington, D.C., is an innovative, entrepreneurial institution with national distinction in a range of academic fields. With strong undergraduate and graduate degree programs in engineering, information technology, biotechnology and health care, Mason prepares its students to succeed in the work force and meet the needs of the region and the world. Mason professors conduct groundbreaking research in areas such as cancer, climate change, information technology and the biosciences, and Mason’s Center for the Arts brings world-renowned artists, musicians and actors to its stage. Its School of Law is recognized by U.S. News & World Report as one of the top 40 law schools in the United States.