Omeka: WordPress for your digital library
Wed 20 Feb 2008, 4:11 pm
From Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog comes the announcement of the public beta of Omeka, software designed to host digital collections and to show them to their advantage as online exhibitions. In a nutshell, Cohen describes it as “WordPress for your exhibits and collections.”
This comes to us from the ass-kickers (sorry, I can’t think of a better term for them) over at the Center for History and New Media. I think Zotero shows that these folks know how to put together a project, roll it out, establish a user base, and keep improving it.
I downloaded Omeka and installed it on my MacBook under the MAMP environment. It was no more difficult to install than WordPress, though things aren’t working exactly right quite yet because I can’t get it to find my install of ImageMagick. (Help?)
I’m obviously in no position to review or recommend Omeka yet, but I find the project very exciting and full of possibilities. I have been working on and off with OCLC’s ContentDM (or however they want me to capitalize it) and have found it a frustrating and expensive experience. I have long wanted an easy-to-set-up, free open source digital collection management tool, and it looks like Omeka fits that bill. It also takes into account the importance of user-contributed objects and metadata, and comes with what should be no-brainers like RSS feeds and easily switched and customized themes.
The Omeka developers realize that libraries and museums who put up digital collections don’t just want to throw their visitors to a search box or a “browse everything in accession number order” screen. We want to create exhibitions that guide people through carefully curated selections of the objects in the database. Omeka builds this in as a standard feature.
Whether it will be the right combination of powerful and elegant and easy to use, I don’t know, but looking at the featured sites in the Omeka showcase makes me hopeful. I can’t wait to see what people do with it, and hope to get my own glitches out soon so I can play with it more myself.
- License:
- File under: Digital libraries
- Comments? 10
Hi Steve,
Great post on Omeka. As one of its developers at CHNM, we’ve worked hard to strike the “right combination of powerful and elegant and easy to use,” just like you said.
In regard to your question, try this:
“Make sure the path to ImageMagick is correct in your settings. You can check this by using the command “which convert” on the command line. Then, look in Admin > Settings > General Settings > Local Path to ImageMagick binary to see if the path matches what comes up when you run that command.”
By searching the codex (http://omeka.org/codex/) you can find further information about how Omeka works, as well as on the forums where you’re welcome to look for further help beyond this brief hat-tip.
Thanks again for your interest – maybe I’ll see you on the forums!
Best,
Dave Lester
Omeka Developer
Comment by Dave Lester — February 20, 2008 @ 5:36 pm
Our micropolitan public library uses ContentDM for our digital projects as well and, due to the expensive licensing, we are searching for a replacement. This looks like it might be a possible solution. Thanks for bringing it to our attention!
Comment by Jerry Yarnetsky — February 20, 2008 @ 9:15 pm
[...] So far Omeka’s 0.9.0 release has been mentioned in several notable places, including the Official Omeka Blog, Inside Higher Ed, Found History, Steve Lawson, and Dan Cohen’s blog. Tom gives a great overview of the project, and how it fits into our former director Roy Rosenzweig’s belief in the practice of public history. Dan Cohen provides some beautiful screen captures of Omeka, and came up with what’s got to be my favorite description of Omeka so far: For Zotero, it’s “like iTunes for your references and research”; for Omeka, think “WordPress for your exhibits and collections.” WordPress for your exhibits and collections it is! And the bundled COinS plugin for Omeka makes your site Zotero compatible, too! [...]
Pingback by Finding America » Blog Archive » Omeka Goes Public with release 0.9.0 — February 20, 2008 @ 10:32 pm
Jerry — Thanks for your interest in Omeka. Just so you know, we are currently working on migration and import/export tools to allow increased interoperability with ContentDM and other popular collections management packages. Those should help if you’re thinking of making a switch.
Please keep in touch and let us know how you get on!
Take care,
Tom Scheinfeldt
Executive Producer, Omeka
Managing Director, CHNM
Comment by Tom Scheinfeldt — February 21, 2008 @ 12:40 pm
Thanks, Dave. It turns out that my ImageMagick problem really had nothing to do with Omeka, but with accessing the binary from inside the somewhat hermetic MAMP environment. After searching around for a while last night, I came across the aptly-title post, Getting Imagemagick (and more) to work with MAMP on OS X which seems to work, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the fix broke something else in the process.
Tom, I’m glad that migration tools are part of the plan. Very interesting.
Comment by Steve Lawson — February 21, 2008 @ 10:30 pm
And boy, these Omeka developers are quick on the draw when it comes to the blogosphere! In all seriousness, though, it sounds as though it could be fabulous–just the sort of thing I was dreaming of whilst going through the hell that was my local history digital library independent study.
Comment by Laura — February 25, 2008 @ 3:16 pm
(found you on twittermap.com)
I TOTALLY AGREE ABOUT LEAP DAY! I always thought this should be a holiday.
Comment by Michelle — February 29, 2008 @ 8:49 am
Heh. Thanks Michelle. Michelle is referring to something I wrote on Twitter (which is offline as I type). She snapped a screeshot and posted it on her blog.
Comment by Steve Lawson — February 29, 2008 @ 10:01 am
I’ve come across this post a couple times in the last year or two, and I keep meaning to leave a comment. We’ve used Omeka to create a directory of digital collections in NYC, and we’re in the process of writing a report to document what we did. That report will also include information about a proof-of-concept project to show how you can use Omeka to deliver up collections created in CONTENTdm.
Comment by Jason — August 8, 2009 @ 9:06 pm
Thanks, Jason. That sounds like a very useful report. If you remember, please let me know when it is available, or send me a copy.
Comment by Steve Lawson — August 8, 2009 @ 10:26 pm