Omeka is a free and open source web publishing platform developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. It is used by scholars, archivists, and librarians around the world to publish archival collections and research projects online, using a suite of tools that have been developed to extend Omeka’s capabilities to mapping, annotation, and beyond.
As an open source platform, Omeka is an ideal choice for a project that aims to make scholarly research accessible to the public, as MOL does. Omeka’s source code is not only free to use, but also readily available to be modified to fit the needs of a particular project. Open source software is also built to be expanded upon, so that the tools developed throughout the lifetime of a given project can be made available to other projects as well. Omeka is also built to be extensible, so there is an existing ecosystem of open source plugins that can be brought in, as well as an infrastructure that makes building new plugins much simpler.
One path to Omeka at Harvard began as early as 2012, with individual faculty members at Harvard using Omeka in their courses. These initial forays gave students a place to share their work online, and encouraged them to experiment with new approaches to creating and disseminating scholarship. However, none of these instances of Omeka were centrally supported, with each faculty member finding their own way to host their course’s content. Beginning in the fall of 2015, the History Department began managing installations of Omeka on a departmental cloud server, meaning that, instead of relying on external vendors for hosting and support, each installation is managed by the Digital Scholarship Facilitator in the History Department. This arrangement allows for more flexibility, features, and customization while reducing burdens on course instructors or project contributors, and so it is the infrastucture that MOL uses. You can browse the exhibits created by students in the Introduction to Digital History Course, taught at Harvard in the fall of 2015, as an example of what Omeka is capable of.
Omeka has been a popular choice among teaching staff involved with Harvard’s Digital Teaching Fellows initiative, which pairs digitally literate teaching fellows and teaching assistants with a specific course in order to incorporate digital skills and projects within an existing syllabus. Because Omeka has a relatively short learning curve, instructors are able to dedicate class or section time to activities which emphasize digital literacy. For instance, students learn the vocabulary necessary to express themselves properly (such as “metadata”), discover how to build a database well (or not so well), and explore the intersection of visual form with content.
Although there are obvious technical benefits to using Omeka, other web publishing platforms that work in similar ways provide alternatives. What sets Omeka apart from its peers is that it applies a technical foundation to academically-minded information organization, comparable to the ways a library, archive, or museum approaches its information organization. The basis of any Omeka site is it collection of “Items”, those materials being described that form the building blocks of all of the other content in the site. Other parts of Omeka—exhibits, collections, and maps enabled by plugins—build on these items to put them in a more narrative context, one that makes it easy to incorporate multimedia and interactive elements. Please feel free to reach out to the MOL staff if you’re interested in discussing the “back end” of how MOL’s Omeka instance is constructed!