Are you interested in playing with Omeka before downloading and installing your own copy? If you are, please visit our new Sandbox. Here you may test the functionality of an Omeka installation by adding and editing items, creating collections, building exhibits, and changing settings. Unlike a copy that you download, you cannot upload files, install plugins, or change the CSS. But, we think the Sandbox still gives you a good idea of what Omeka can do.

To access the administrative panel, go to:http://omeka.org/sandbox/demo/admin. At the login screen, enter “demo” as the username and “sandbox” as the password (do not include quotation marks).

Play all that you want, because we will reload the original database and its settings at the end of the day.

In step with other open source projects, we recently set up a Google group to act as a developer mailing list.  The Omeka Dev list is open to anyone, but specifically designed to discuss the underlying code of Omeka, plugin development, data and migration, among other things.   Those interested in contributing code patches can do so in this group as well – information about SVN and Trac are posted as a message on the group.  From our end, we’ll use this group as a way to communicate with developers about what we’re working on and changes that are being made.  And don’t forget, for Omeka users who aren’t ready or interested in diving into Omeka’s code, we’d encourage you to continue using the forums which are still “buzzing.”

It’s April, so it’s time to think about exhibits. You might ask why in April? Even though the official equinox is in March, April feels more Spring-like bringing with it metaphors of renewal, growth, and productivity. Perhaps we are getting too deep, but we are curious to know if you have built any exhibits since the release of Omeka 0.9.0.

To share your work, we created a special section in the forums called “Use Cases” where you may show off your exhibits and/or sites–finished or in-progress works. You can even comment on the exhibit development process or lessons you learned along the way.

We are tweaking the exhibit builder feature for future releases and are very interested in hearing about your experiences.

Please take a minute to post some of your projects or thoughts in the Use Cases section of the forum.

Happy Spring!

Omeka 0.9.1 is our first release since the initial public launch on February 20, 2008. It fixes 20+ bugs, and we highly recommend that all users upgrade their existing Omeka installations. The API hasn’t changed since the 0.9.0 release, so existing themes and plugins should continue to work after the upgrade.

If you have found a bug in Omeka, we would love to hear about it on the forums. We ask only that you first make sure that you have upgraded to the latest available release of Omeka. Also, bugs are fixed on a daily basis, and developers who would like to keep up with the latest changes are invited to check out a copy of the stable-0.9 branch via SVN.

Enjoy!

We’ve just fixed a couple of critical bugs in the Geolocation plugin, so anyone who is currently using it will need to update to the latest version. It’s as simple as downloading the new plugin and unzipping it into your plugins/ directory in Omeka.

We have returned from a very productive meeting organized by our great partners at the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) in St. Paul. We worked, listened, and discussed Omeka 0.9.0 with folks from MHS, along with others from the Great Rivers Network, University of Minnesota libraries, Science Museum of Minnesota, Carleton College library, Northfield Historical Society and Public Library, Stillwater Public Library, and Hennepin County Medical Center History Museum.

Our goals for this meeting were threefold:

1. To introduce Omeka and projects built upon its base.

2. To demonstrate how Omeka works by building and shaping an archive and then pulling items together for a mock curated exhibit.

3. To discuss concerns and listen to feedback on Omeka’s user interface, overall functionality, and potential new features.

Our working group was incredibly lively and talkative, which pleased us. We took copious notes and are sharing them with the entire Omeka team.

While Omeka is flexible for many projects, we are particularly concerned with meeting the needs of smaller museums and libraries who have fascinating collections to share, but lack an inexpensive and easy way to publish them online. One workshop participant volunteers at the Stillwater Public Library and works with their special collections. She wants to digitize many of their documents and publish them in a system that is fully searchable and easy to access, because she knows that many researchers do not know the breadth of their collections. She liked using Omeka and hopes that it can provide the library with an affordable solution for accomplishing their goals.

Other participants came to the meeting with collaboration in mind. A group of libraries and museums from Northfield, MN envisions using Omeka to aggregate data stored in different collections and content management systems. Omeka not only offers this group a database for publishing their resources online, but will eventually provide plugins to make batch importing of records from different CMS’s into installations possible and easy.

The most recent report from IMLS found that adults trust museum and library websites more than other sources of information, including government sites. So, why not publish more content? We think Omeka can expand the amount of content available in the current museum- and library-sphere, and can increase the presence of medium and smaller museums and libraries who want to share their expertise and collections with eager online audiences.

In our ongoing effort to make Omeka a better tool to access your documents online, we are proud to announce the release of the iPaper and PdfMeNot plugins.

Developed by the document sharing company Scribd, iPaper is a “document format built for the Internet.” With Omeka’s iPaper plugin you’ll be able to automatically convert your documents to the iPaper format and embed them into your website. All you need is to register for a free Scribd Platform API account, install and configure the Omeka iPaper plugin, and your documents will be available for browsing and searching directly in your web browser. Supported documents include Portable Document Format (pdf), Microsoft Word (doc), PowerPoint (ppt), and most OpenDocument formats.

Developed by the web startup workshop Stateless Systems, PdfMeNot is another free service that converts your documents to a format that is viewable within in your web browser. With Omeka’s PdfMeNot plugin you’ll be able to automatically convert your .pdf files and embed them directly into your website. PdfMeNot only supports Portable Document Format (pdf).

Both plugins are fully configurable and easy to use. The iPaper and PdfMeNot document viewers will be available on the administrative item show pages by default. If you wish to embed them in your public theme, see these directions. Have fun with the plugins and tell us what you think.

Download the iPaper plugin
Download the PdfMeNot plugin

The Omeka team should be encouraged. At three weeks since we released the public beta, we’re had over 500 downloads and had a flurry of interest at conferences including WebWise & code4lib. We’re in a good position to continue building an active developer community that augments Omeka’s core. Here are three exciting examples:

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 on the official Omeka blog as well as my own blog. If you’re on twitter, you can follow Omeka or myself. Tom and Sharon are both tweeting away as well!

[Cross-posted on Finding America]

I’m just returning from the Institute for Museum and Library Service’s WebWise conference in Miami, where I spent the last two days talking about Omeka with librarians, museum professionals and digital humanists who are on the cutting edge of using Web 2.0 technologies to share their materials with the public. The theme of this year’s conference was “The Power of Community” and there were a number of exciting talks and presentations that pointed to the future of digital outreach for cultural institutions. I got to speak with many, many committed people who were passionate about sharing their work and their collections. These conversations convinced me that Omeka will be an important tool in this digital work.

First, these users are looking for flexibility both in design and operation. Omeka has the capacity to produce unique looking sites that mesh with an institution’s existing digital presence. Also, Omeka’s archival system uses core metadata and item types, which makes it easily adaptable to the very different and specific needs of institutions from those that deal with great works of art to those that deal with ancient artifacts.

Second, cultural institutions have fascinating holdings, and their curators, archivists, librarians and resident scholars have a world of knowledge about those holdings that they need to communicate to the public. Omeka can facilitate this communication. Omeka was popular with the crowd at WebWise because it allows content experts to publish exhibits that combine rich layers of narrative interpretation with items that are accompanied by full metadata records.

Third, users need something inexpensive and easy to use, preferably open source. For cultural institutions with limited resources and budgets, this is one of Omeka’s real bonuses. Without making a huge investment in a thickly articulated content management system or a publishing mechanism that wraps content in Flash, institutions can use Omeka to increase their digital presence, quickly and easily, without hiring expensive designers or extra programming help. Additionally, Omeka exhibits will allow many of the important departments of museums and libraries to work together to produce narrative exhibits, with teaching components, and Web 2.0 features that encourage the public to return to sites again and again.

So, with those key points in mind, I’m happy to welcome all of our new WebWise friends who will be experimenting with Omeka as a web publication tool for their museum, library, or cultural institution. Please stay in touch and feel free to post to the forums as you use Omeka. We want to hear how things are going and to see the wonderful exhibits that you build.

It has been only three or four days since we released Omeka to the wild, and already we’re seeing some amazing interest. As of this posting, Omeka 0.9.0 has been downloaded more than 200 times, has been blogged by at least 50 authors, and for a brief time made the del.icio.us homepage “hotlist.” Most exciting to me, however, is the traffic to Omeka’s support forums, which shows that people are really using the software. Most of what we’re seeing are installation difficulties, especially where users are trying to install Omeka on third-party, commercial hosting services like Bluehost and Lunarpages.* The good news is that most of these problems can be worked out relatively easily, and I encourage anyone who is having trouble to take a look at the Getting Started and Troubleshooting forum threads and to post your questions there. Our crack team of developers will be happy to help out. Omeka is still in beta, and as an open source project, we hope everyone will feel comfortable joining the forums, becoming active in the community of users and developers, and just generally helping us make the software better.

* Note: if you don’t already have a hosting account and are thinking of signing up for one to try Omeka, we encourage you to consider Dreamhost, where Omeka has been most thoroughly tested and where we know it works seamlessly.

[Crossposted from Found History]