Omeka

We’re pleased to release a new Omeka plugin today: the MediaRSS plugin for the Cooliris image viewer. This plugin makes your archive browsable using the popular Firefox extension that “transforms your browser into a full-screen 3D experience for enjoying online media.” The ability to zoom into images and browse a visual wall creates a new way of navigating through your Omeka site.

Go ahead and download version 1.0, and follow the instructions on how to install the plugin in your theme.

Have you ever wanted to annotate your images on Omeka like you can on Flickr? 

Now you can with the beta release of Omeka’s Image Annotation plugin!  Using an adaptation of Chris Woods’ jQuery plugin, jquery-image-annotate, Omeka’s new Image Annotation plugin allows users to add textual annotations to images. To add an image annotation, users select a region of the image and then attach a textual description.  The plugin offers a searchable annotation page for admins, an image annotation gallery for item pages, and a configuration page that allows admins to specify plugin permissions for different types of users.

Download, install, and test the plugin. Start annotating your images on Omeka and let us know what you think.

We want to remind you that our OAI-PMH Harvester and Repository plugins are now available for last minute testing. The Harvester imports metadata from remote OAI-PMH data providers, while the Repository exposes your Omeka metadata using the OAI-PMH specification. Both plugins are release candidates (1.0RC), meaning we don’t recommend that you use them on your production sites yet; but we feel that they are almost ready for prime-time. If you’re interested in either plugin, this is the time to try them out on a test Omeka installation and give us feedback.

If you have been waiting to try Omeka, today’s the day.

Today the Omeka team at CHNM and our growing developer community are celebrating the release of Omeka 1.0. This production-grade release marks the completion of Omeka’s basic requirement set. Maintaining our commitment to serious web publishing for scholarship and cultural heritage, Omeka 1.0 incorporates unqualified Dublin Core metadata for organizing and displaying collections; support for extensible element sets; robust, flexible theme and plugin APIs; and plugins for Zotero compatibility, static page creation, and building sophisticated online exhibitions.

New with Omeka 1.0 is an improved exhibit builder; support for associating and displaying file-type icons; JPEG2000 support; and new import plugins, including a CSV importer and an OAI-PMH harvester. Moreover, with the addition of an OAI-PMH repository plugin, Omeka can now serve as an OAI provider. Best of all, Omeka 1.0 maintains its five minute setup, its intuitive user interface, its easy design theme switching, its many site enhancing plugins, and its free support resources.

This is a major milestone for Omeka, and we are very grateful to the many supporters, evangelists, open source developers, forums contributors, funding agencies, and friends who made it possible. Over the next several months, the Omeka team will continue to release bug fixes, minor improvements, and additional plugins and themes. But most of our energy will be devoted to making Omeka available as a hosted web service, allowing Omeka users the choice of downloading and hosting their own installation of Omeka, or signing up for a hosted account at Omeka.net. Stay tuned.

Download Omeka 1.0 today.