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We're excited to see the new version of the Omeka CMS / virtual exhibit / digital collection system now available for beta testing.

Omeka is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) for online digital collections. With Omeka, you can quickly build a searchable repository of archival, artifact or other records and assemble them into virtual exhibits to showcase your holdings.

Most content management systems are designed to manage a single website with a hierarchy of pages, in which are placed text and other media. In contrast, Omeka is based around items (e.g. historic documents, photographs, audio or video recordings, etc.) which can be arranged into collections and most importantly, exhibits – pages of items.

Over time, the same item, entered only once, can be re-used in multiple exhibits.

An easy-to-use web interface provides site adminstrators with access to all the important back-end features: configuring the site appearance and navigation, uploading items (individually or in batches, such as from a database export), changing themes, and creating information pages as well as exhibits.

Omeka's features puts content management and virtual exhibit building in your hands, with no technical support needed to launch new exhibits.

The new version, known as Omeka S, includes features to take advantage of linked open data, and to manage multiple sites within a single Omeka installation.

Andornot has partnered with a few clients on Omeka projects, such as The Storebox.

You can learn more about Omeka at http://www.andornot.com/products/omeka-content-management-system.aspx or read more about Omeka S specifically at http://omeka.org/blog/2016/11/02/happy-beta-release-day-omeka-s/. See also the Omeka development roadmap at https://omeka.org/about/roadmap/ then contact Andornot to discuss using Omeka to manage your collections or to create virtual exhibits.

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The Storebox is a digital repository of interesting, illuminating, best practices of new and social media use by Christian communities. The Storebox highlights what Christian communities and leaders (lay and ordained) are doing with digital technologies to share the gospel (as they understand it), to connect communities, and to envision/incarnate "church" in the digital age.

The Storebox

The Storebox is a project of the New Media Project at the Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. It contains case studies, collections, and exhibits curated by students at Fordham University, in New York City, under the direction of Professor Kathryn Reklis

Using the open-source Omeka content management and virtual exhibit system, Prof. Reklis and her students have built a diverse collection of examples of Christian usage of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, podcasts, blogs, plain old websites and more.

"I'm drawn to Omeka for its cost-effective means of presenting and organizing content and allowing users to interact with the content in meaningful ways. Also, most of the content will be generated by undergraduate college students, and Omeka seems like an excellent choice in this regard as well." – Prof. Reklis

The site is available at http://omeka.cts.edu 

Andornot developed a custom Omeka theme for this project and tailored it for the specific needs of the project and users.

Contact us to discuss Omeka and other systems for curating and managing digital content.

Last night I had the pleasure of speaking to students at the School of Library, Archival and Information studies (aka iSchool) at the University of British Columbia. These students are taking LIBR 582: Digital Images and Text Collections and learning all the fundamentals of how to digitize materals, manage them, and provide online access. In particular, they are using Inmagic DB/TextWorks to build a database of digitized materials, and manage the metadata associated with them, as well as CONTENTdm from OCLC for web presentation.

In last night's class, I presented Andornot's common solutions for managing digital images and text. For those who missed the presentation, here's a recap.

Inmagic DB/TextWorks and an Andornot Starter Kit

We always recommend Inmagic DB/TextWorks as an easy to use database system for managing metadata about digitized objects, whether they are textual, photographic or audio-visual, and no matter whether born digitial or scanned from an analogue source. Paired with one of our starter kits, any library, archive, museum or other organization can be up and running in just a few hours. Information can be entered in simple data entry screens, by staff or volunteers, or imported from other sources.

Inmagic WebPublisher PRO

Inmagic's original web publishing platform, combined with an Andornot kit, can provide simple search access to a DB/TextWorks database. A modern web design can be applied so that the site can be used on tablets and phones. Features such as spelling corrections and facets are not available however.

Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI)

The Andornot Discovery Interface (AnDI) uses the popular Apache Solr search engine to provide relevancy-ranked results, spelling corrections, and facets for search refinement. Websites built with AnDI include features for displaying images in various sizes, in list or gallery format, for embedding playback of audio and video files, and for viewing and browsing individual pages of digitized documents, with highlighting of search terms on the pages.

VuFind

The open-source VuFind discovery interface is very popular with academic and public libraries, and a growing number of special ones.

Inmagic Presto

Inmagic's current generation web publishing platform offers users the ability to configure their own screens and displays with no programming required, and now includes facets for search refinement.

Omeka

The open-source Omeka content management system can be used for metadata management as well as searching. It doesn't offer spelling corrections or facets for search refinement, but does provide a very easy to use web interface and an Exhibit Builder plug-in to develop exhibits of aspects of a collection.

From time to time we select new and usually open-source applications to add to our stable of recommended products. Recently we've started working with Omeka, a content management system (CMS) for online digital collections. With Omeka, you can quickly build a searchable repository of archival or artifact records and assemble them into virtual exhibits to showcase your holdings. Omeka is a great choice for archives, museums and historical societies.

Key Features

Most content management systems are designed to manage a single website with a hierarchy of pages, in which are placed text and other media. In contrast, Omeka is based around items (e.g. historic documents, photographs, audio or video recordings, etc.) which can be arranged into collections and most importantly, exhibits – pages of items.

Over time, the same item, entered only once, can be re-used in multiple exhibits.

Exhibits can have their own unique "theme" (a combination of graphic design and page layout) to differentiate them from other exhibits. Within an exhibit you can create multiple separate pages, and each can present a different layout of text, images, video and other elements.

An easy-to-use web interface provides site adminstrators with access to all the important back-end features: configuring the site appearance and navigation, uploading items (individually or in batches, such as from a DB/TextWorks export), changing themes, and creating information pages as well as exhibits.

Omeka’s features puts content management and virtual exhibit building in your hands, with no technical support needed to launch new exhibits.

Examples

Omeka was developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and is in widespread use by libraries and archives across North America. A list of some sites powered by Omeka is available here, but there may be many more unreported uses.

Some examples include:

Learn More

  • This video provides a brief but excellent overview of Omeka’s features.
  • This video shows usage of the Exhibit Builder plugin to create a new exhibit.
  • This web page provides an overview of Omeka and its many uses.

Andornot can help you install and configure Omeka locally, or hosted with our managed hosting service. Contact us to discuss your needs today.

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