“So what does this mean?” Omeka is ready for use today. Whether you’re a scholar, an enthusiast, an archivist or librarian, you’ll find Omeka easy to use and customize to your needs. To use a phrase from early on in the project, Omeka is a great tool to “show your stuff” on the web. Digital photos, scans of documents, texts, video.. anything. It can help organize those objects, and present them elegantly on the web. But don’t just take my word for it — go ahead and look through examples in our showcase page to get some ideas. Dan Cohen had a great post about the Ringwood Library’s use of Omeka, and I see this as only the beginning.

“But we already have a CMS and it’s called WordPress.” I love WordPress, as evidenced by my work developing plugins along with it powering this blog. But unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t use structured metadata the way that scholars, libraries, and archives do. We have controlled vocabularies, 50 ways of classifying the same thing, and need a system that allows us to easily do that. Omeka can help. Featuring an unqualified Dublin Core metadata schema, Omeka 0.10 beta also includes fully extensible element sets to accommodate interoperability and make Omeka a simple solution that can be used by an individual, while also running a powerful engine that can accommodate large digital archives.

As I work on this project, I’m excited by how actively Omeka is reshaping my own scholarly methods. We’re too often bogged down with disciplinary distinctions in the humanities that cloud the commonalities between our research interests. That’s one of the reasons I’ve identified so closely with American Studies and interdisciplinary work. And it’s my hope that in some way, Omeka can also be a bridge among the humanities. As a tool, it thoughtfully incorporates metadata standards and important features that can be integrated into all of our research methods. If you’re interested in joining us and using Omeka, please post on the forums, or contact us. We’d love to hear from you.

1) Omeka forum user Kerim recently posted on the forums about his idea to use the iPaper document viewer for displaying pdf and doc files in a slick flash-based interface. After experiencing some problems, he asked for help and Omeka crack programmer Jim Safley went to work on a soon-to-be-released iPaper plugin. I know there has been some buzz about iPaper recently, so it’s great to see this feature being added to Omeka’s growing plugin directory.

2) One of the hardest parts of getting an open source project off the ground is helping support early adopters, and despite the high level of traffic the forums have been receiving we’ve been able to keep up-to-date with most questions, thanks to the hard work of the Omeka team and the community itself! This is one of the most-promising signs of the project, that users unaffiliated with CHNM are going out of their way to help others with their installations. Special thanks to MrDys and Syma!

3) Wally Grotophorst at the GMU library has been exploring ways of harvesting data from their MARS (Dspace) repository and pulling that metadata into Omeka. According to Wally, “once an Omeka database of items was built using the DSpace metadata, non-technical staff could log into Omeka and build exhibits.” And Wally isn’t the only one interested in this; others I met at code4lib made strong cases for Omeka’s use in very similar situations. With some terrific ideas for how this could be done, this is the start of a conversation that will mature in the future.

As our community of Omekans continues to grow you can enter these ongoing conversations by posting on the forums. We’ve created categories for different topics, including plugins and a space to discuss data migration. I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in migrating data to Omeka to post their ideas and works-in-progress there. For updates on what’s going on with Omeka, I’ll continue to post here on my blog, as well as the official Omeka blog. If you’re on twitter, you can follow Omeka or myself.

We made it to episode two! And check out that Omeka swag! Omeka was featured in the most-recent episode of THAT Podcast, including interviews with CHNM Managing Director, Tom Scheinfeldt and Director of Public Projects, Sharon Leon. The second half of the episode is a screencast taking you through the process of downloading and installing Omeka. The interviews are great reflective moments on Omeka’s current strengths, and where the project is moving in the future.

Jeremy and I plan on featuring Omeka in future episodes – hacking themes and creating plugins, so I’d encourage you to subscribe to the video podcast, or the audio version as well.

The public release is an important one. We’ve reached a point where we feel comfortable enough with the code that it can run seamlessly for the largest number of users possible. A huge addition, we’ve created what is the start of a plugins directory, allowing Omeka’s core to be augmented in a WordPress-like fashion. Users are encouraged to contribute plugins, as well as themes. And with that openness, we are beginning the development of a community that is centered not only around publishing objects, but also creating open source software that can make history and information accessible to people.

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!

I expect to see you all on the forums! If you have questions or comments about Omeka, please address them there.

Greater Database Flexibility
Thanks to the hard work of Kris Kelly, we’ve removed the Object Relational Mapper Doctrine from our core code, in favor of a custom solution that removes an unnecessary library and makes Omeka significantly faster.

The new version also doesn’t require PDO, but can support mySQLi as a substitute instead. For some users on shared hosts that don’t support PDO, this will come in handy.

Database prefixing allows you to have multiple Omeka installs running on a single database, which is once again important for users on shared hosting.

A New Plugin
We packaged Omeka with a “Dropbox” plugin I’ve been developing – it allows you to batch upload files to get your collection online faster than entering each item separately. I’ve found this to be incredibly useful when putting images online, and I’m sure others will find this helpful as well.

RSS for Syndication of everything
A flexible solution for the aggregation of items is now included in Omeka. XML and RDF outputs can also be given, for not only new items added to a collection, but search results as well. Plugins can hook into the feed class to add their own RSS feeds as well.

Learn More
We’re currently in private beta, but adding new testers with each release. To learn more, visit our website, and email us to sign up to be a beta tester.

The WPBook plugin I wrote for WordPress that embeds your blog into the Facebook canvas could be adapted for an Omeka plugin to display a collection in a similar fashion. In addition to retemplating the content of the site, the plugin would push FBML to a user’s profile to customize the way item appears. I don’t have immediate plans to build this – it remains on a rainy day to-do list, but if there’s interest then I could be persuaded to create this sooner than later.

If a Facebook Application seems too large of a task, Facebook recently unveiled Pages, which allow institutions, companies, and products to essentially have their own profiles. Prior to this, Facebook had banned profiles for non-individuals. For an example of a page, I set one for CHNM that you can be a “fan” of. Similar to user profiles, pages can add applications designed for them, including have a wall where visitors can leave comments. CHNM will start pulling in future blog posts using a feed application added to our profile, and maybe we’ll toss in some other apps for good measure. Maybe superpoke? Well, maybe the virtual bookshelf is more useful.

At the time of writing this, 19 museums around the world and 145 libraries have already created their own Facebook pages. It will be interesting to see if these pages replace similar groups, which I previously suggested for libraries and museums that were looking for an easy Facebook presence.

If you’d like to get involved – visit our forums and chat about the possibilities of Omeka, ask questions you may have, or add to our codex so we can begin to offer documentation that suits our growing user base. Also, feel free to dissect the prepackaged plugin and themes and make your own! We’ll be implementing a dynamic directory for both once we launch our public beta in spring, but for now email us with what you’re developing, we’d love to hear from you.

CHNM was recently awarded a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to fund Omeka’s development, and we’re currently in private beta. If you’re interested in getting on the invitation list to download and test Omeka, email us and we’ll notify you when there are additional spaces. You’ll also get current information about Omeka’s development at the Omeka blog.

One of the exciting things about Omeka is that it;s extensible for ‘oth themes and plugins. Similar to WordPress, Omeka allows administrators to FTP files into the respective directories, then easily activate extended features. There are tons of possibilities with this. Many projects at CHNM were started using earlier versions of Omeka and deal with collecting oral histories, like the September 11th Archive. Omeka has a contribution plugin so that you can perform similar collecting.

With the passing of Roy Rosenzweig, founder and director of CHNM, we’ve set up a site called Thanks, Roy to gather stories and images about him. The site honors his contribution to us all, and is run by Omeka. Whether you knew Roy or not, I’d encourage you to take some time to visit the site. The contributions so far are nothing short of heartfelt and inspiring. Thanks, Roy.