The Omeka team is always interested in the ways that people and institutions are using the software, so every once in a while we ask you to represent.

Take a minute and fill out our brief survey to report how you’re using Omeka.

We’ll publish the results without contact information so that the whole user community can get a sense of the great sites you’re building with Omeka.

As an open source, not-for-profit, warm-and-fuzzy, community service oriented project, we don’t normally like to talk about market rivals or competitive products when we talk about Omeka. Nevertheless, we are often asked to compare Omeka with other products. "Who’s Omeka’s competition?" is a fairly frequent question. Like many FAQs, there is an easy answer and a more complicated one.

The easy answer is there is no competition. ;-) Omeka’s mix of ease of use, focus on presentation and narrative exhibition, adherence to standards, accommodation for library, museum, and academic users, open source license, open code flexibility, and low ($0) price tag really make it one of a kind. If you are a librarian, archivist, museum professional, or scholar who wants a free, open, relatively simple platform for building a compelling online exhibition, there really isn’t any alternative.

The more complicated answer is that there are lots of products on the market that do one or some of the things Omeka does. The emergence of the web has brought scholars and librarians, archivists, and museum professionals into increasingly closer contact and conversation as humanists are required to think differently and more deeply about the nature of information and librarians are required to play an ever more public role online. Yet these groups’ respective tool sets have remained largely separate. Library and archives professionals operate in a world of institutional repositories (Fedora, DSpace), integrated library systems (Evergreen, Ex Libris), and digital collections systems (CONTENTdm, Greenstone). Museum professionals operate in a world of collections management systems (TMS, KE Emu, PastPerfect) and online exhibition packages (Pachyderm, eMuseum). The humanist or interpretive professional’s online tool set is usually based around an off-the-rack web content management system such as WordPress (for blogs), MediaWiki (for wikis), or Drupal (for community sites). Alas, even today too much of this front facing work is still being done in Microsoft Publisher.

The collections professional’s tools are excellent for preserving digital collections, maintaining standardized metadata, and providing discovery services. They are less effective when it comes to exhibiting collections or providing the rich visual and interpretive context today’s web users expect. They are also often difficult to deploy and expensive to maintain. The blogs, wikis, and off-the-rack content management systems of the humanist (and, indeed, of the public programs staff within collecting institutions, especially museums) are the opposite: bad at handling collections and standardized metadata, good at building engaging experiences, and relatively simple and inexpensive to deploy and maintain.

Omeka aims to fill this gap by providing a collections-focused web publishing platform that offers both rigorous adherence to standards and interoperability with the collections professional’s toolkit and the design flexibility, interpretive opportunities, and ease of use of popular web authoring tools.

[Figure 1. Omeka Technology Ecosystem]

By combining these functions, Omeka helps advance collaboration of many sorts: between collections professionals and interpretive professionals, between collecting institutions and scholars, between a "back of the house" and "front of the house" staff, and so on.

[Figure 2. Omeka User Ecosystem]

In doing so, Omeka also helps advance the convergence and communication between librarians, archivists, museum professionals, and scholars that the digital age has sparked, allowing LAM professionals to participate more fully in the scholarship of the humanities and humanists to bring sophisticated information management techniques to their scholarship.

Which brings us back to the short answer. There really is no competition.

[Crossposted from Found History]

We are excited to announce two new Omeka plugins that were developed by the folks at the University of Virginia’s Scholar’s Lab. Ethan Gruber took the lead and since he knows much more about the EAD Importer and VRA Core plugins than we do, we asked him if we could cross-post his Scholar’s Lab blog entry, Expanding the Capabilities of Omeka here. Ethan is a web application developer for Digital Research and Scholarship, a division of the University of Virginia Library.

Note: Plugins available for check out through SVN for now, but will be available to download as zip files through the plugin directory in the near future.

Because I have a keen interest in the description of cultural heritage artifacts and in doing interesting things with metadata, in recent months I have developed a handful of Omeka plugins to meet these interests. My first foray into plugin development for the application was with the EAD Importer. The EAD Importer, as the name suggests, extracts item-level metadata (along with a bit of collection-level metadata, like rights) from Encoded Archival Description finding aids and generates a CSV file which can be imported through the CSV Import plugin developed by the Omeka crew. The plugin would be useful to archivists who would like to use Omeka to build online exhibits of their collections. I took this framework a step further to create a plugin that is capable of importing any flat XML into Omeka by transforming that file into a CSV file.

Most recently, I have turned my attention to expanding the descriptive abilities of Omeka into the realm of collections of artwork. Omeka items are described with Dublin Core, which is capable of describing anything, though not particularly well. I developed VraCoreElementSet, which incorporates VRA Core fields into the Edit Item form. VRA Core is a much more semantically appropriate schema for describing art and artifacts. Since it was conceived as an XML standard (not strictly a flat list of fields), some elements have hierarchical sub-componenets. For example, a work may have several agents involved in its production, and each agent has a name as well as a role, culture, birth date, and, as the case may be, a death date. The VraCoreElementSet plugin creates a table for agents so that a user may enter this data separately. Then in the Edit Item form, the user may select VRA Core agents from a drop down menu restricted by the records in the agents table. Records may also be exported to schema-compliant VRA Core XML. There is still some work remaining on this plugin, but it is well on its way toward completion.

Now that the Scholars’ Lab has contributed EAD Importer and VRA Core Element Set plugins, Omeka may attract new institutional users from the library, archive, and museum fields, who may have otherwise settled for proprietary applications to disseminate their digital collections.

The Omeka Team plans to host another pre-THATCamp playdate at CHNM on May 21, 2010 from 10am – 3pm. As always, the playdates are free and the wisdom gained is priceless.

This playdate will focus on design and development. We are seeking participants who are already working with Omeka and are looking to improve their development and/or design skills. As usual, we will begin and end the day together as a big group, and will spend much of the time working in small groups.

For more information and registration, please see the May Playdate page on the codex. Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis.

We are trying something new this year and launching our first Omeka Plugin Rush. The Omeka Team needs help building plugins, so we decided to turn to our Omeka developer community for some assistance. Will you help us?

What, you might ask, will developers get in return for this work? In addition to the public praise the Omeka team will heap upon you, we will send along a mystery box of SWAG and a cash prize–each plugin pays a different amount depending on difficulty.

While we appreciate your ideas for plugins, we have a few in mind for the Rush. By May 1, 2010, we want working code for the following plugins:

• Flickr importer–grab images, metadata and imports into Omeka.($250)
• User tagging–allow anonymous users to tag items on public site. ($100)
• Autocomplete for metadata–make data entry easier by suggesting previously used terms for each field with a dropdown box.($100)
• Timeline Widget– allow users to add a SIMILE Timeline widget to their theme.($100)
• Feed Importer ($250)–import data from Atom and RSS feeds.
• Flash Wrapper ($100)–displays movie files with an embedded flash video player widget.

If you are interested in “rushing”, please do the following:

• Check out the specs for each plugin.
• Email our dev team(will at omeka dot org) stating which plugin you want to build and include a quick proposal or outline for approaching the code (Only one plugin per person or team).
• Wait for dev team response. They will review proposals, make suggestions, and contact applicants to assign plugins. Once a plugin is assigned, it will come off of the list.

This Plugin Rush will be managed and updated on the dev list, and then we will announce the developers on the blog once the code is available for download in the Omeka plugin directory.

This is a great opportunity to test your skills, help an open-source community, and get a box of random things from the Omeka Team.

Tell your friends!