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Apps and CMSs Main Menu

Omeka

1 Omeka is designed for digital libraries and digital exhibits. It allows you to upload digital "objects" with structured metadata associated with it. With these objects and their metadata, you can create themed collections and build exhibits that allow you to expand upon the objects and how they relate to each other. Omeka also has a plugin that allows you to display those objects as a map. This platform does have a moderate learning curve, and relatively simple tasks like building static pages and configuring menus can be confusing. The platform's real strength is in giving you the ability to organize objects by their metadata. So you can create pages that display all of the objects with a given subject, geographic region, or creation date. You can also create rich exhibit pages that allow you to call in the objects from your collections.

Omeka is designed for digital libraries and digital exhibits. It allows you to upload digital "objects" with structured metadata associated with it. With these objects and their metadata, you can create themed collections and build exhibits that allow you to expand upon the objects and how they relate to each other. Omeka also has a plugin that allows you to display those objects as a map. This platform does have a moderate learning curve, and relatively simple tasks like building static pages and configuring menus can be confusing. The platform's real strength is in giving you the ability to organize objects by their metadata. So you can create pages that display all of the objects with a given subject, geographic region, or creation date. You can also create rich exhibit pages that allow you to call in the objects from your collections.

Best For...

Exhibits, collections, or "archives" of material
Projects where the materials showcased need to be organized according to metadata (such as geographic location, subject heading, author, medium, etc.)
Projects that are trying to stitch together items (like books, photographs, digitized documents) to tell a specific narrative about the items and the context in which they were made

Features

Image and metadata viewer
Robust metadata fields (with CSV import) that allow you classify and organize your objects
Exhibits plugin that allows you to write essays and call in objects as evidence
Neatline plugin for creating interactive maps to view your materials

Challenges

Omeka has a bit of a learning curve. Creating static pages and editing menus is not always intuitive, and it is hard to import media that isn't already an item in your Omeka exhibit.

Omeka is also limited in pre-made styling and theme options. Omeka provides its own list of officially supported themes, but these are somewhat limited.

Some Examples

Here are some examples of projects that use Omeka. Please keep in mind that some of these are professionally done with developers hired to build custom themes, plugins, and additional features.

This page has paths:

How do I decide what CMS to use? Office of Digital Research and Scholarship
Contents of this path:
1. WordPress Wordpress is extensible, well documented, and has a lot of options for themes and styling. Wordpress is also probably the CMS with the easiest learning curve. Wordpress is perfect if you just want standard web pages with text and embedded images. Its strengths lie in displaying and organizing categorized content (like blogs), and could be used for applications like digital exhibits. However, if you wish to customize Wordpress to host digital exhibits, editions and translations, or other works with robust metadata, you may need to dig deep into plugins or customizations to get Wordpress to work the way you'd like.
2. How do I decide what CMS to use?
3. Omeka Omeka is designed for digital libraries and digital exhibits. It allows you to upload digital "objects" with structured metadata associated with it. With these objects and their metadata, you can create themed collections and build exhibits that allow you to expand upon the objects and how they relate to each other. Omeka also has a plugin that allows you to display those objects as a map. This platform does have a moderate learning curve, and relatively simple tasks like building static pages and configuring menus can be confusing. The platform's real strength is in giving you the ability to organize objects by their metadata. So you can create pages that display all of the objects with a given subject, geographic region, or creation date. You can also create rich exhibit pages that allow you to call in the objects from your collections.
4. Scalar Scalar is great for publishing long-form projects that benefit from rich multimedia integration and/or non-linear organization. Though it has a somewhat steep learning curve, Scalar allows for polished outputs with all the interactivity of websites while reflecting an overall unified scope of content and organization that most users will find similar to a scholarly monograph. With its rich multimedia implementation tools, Scalar allows for the presentation of media objects in a way that goes beyond simple exhibit displays and provides space for deep annotative discussion. Scalar also provides authors the ability to present complex organizational option within their project's contents, allowing for diverging and converging pathways through the work that can be presented to and navigated by reader-users in ways that highlight different aspects of the content. Scalar does take a while to learn, and presents some challenges in terms of authorship workflow, but does allow for final products that are rich and highly useful.
5. Other Platforms to Consider Wordpress, Omeka, and Scalar address many of the use cases we see in the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship. However, there are other platforms available on CreateFSU (and dozens more we can add, if you would like to use them). The applications listed here may be useful to you if you have a very specific use case in mind, or if you really want to get into the web development side of things.