Occasionally, interested individuals ask the Omeka team about the future and outlook of the project. Without quoting Timbuk3, I say that we are pleased with what lies ahead.

The Omeka project completed its three-year Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant in December 2010 (read the final report)and continues to move forward and grow. Since its public launch in 2008, Omeka exceeded all of our expectations in its growth and adoption by institutions of all sizes, individual scholars, educators, and enthusiasts. We have fostered a strong open source community that continues to thrive. CHNM is committed to supporting this community and its software, which we ourselves use for many of our in-house digital cultural heritage projects. Development of Omeka proceeds towards a version 2.0., and work continues with Omeka.net as well, as the development team makes additional plugins available for the hosted service.

As you may have read last week, we are especially pleased to be working with the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab with funding from the Library of Congress over two years to fund a collaborative “Omeka + Neatline” initiative. The project’s goal is to enable scholars, students, and library and museum professionals to create geospatial and temporal visualizations of archival collections using a Neatline toolset within Omeka. Results from this project feed directly into Omeka to include regular point releases, improved documentation, development community support, user studies, key enhancements to the plugin API, and a set of geo-temporal visualization tools.

Omeka will also continue to grow with our newly-awarded IMLS National Leadership Grant to fund a pilot of an Omeka Commons. The Commons will offer a select group of Omeka institutional users an easy, one-click option for adding their collections to a central preservation grade repository to provide institutions with both a low-overhead preservation pathway for their materials, and greater community exposure and engagement. Second, Omeka Commons will provide researchers with immeasurably greater and centralized discovery and open access to the small collections contained in Omeka sites across the web. Meeting these aims will require significant work that will include enhancements to the core Omeka software, a new Omeka Commons server, and design and production of the Omeka Commons discovery portal. We look forward to getting the pilot launched within two years, so that we can offer the Commons option to all Omeka users.

We published a short roadmap that outlines forthcoming releases and milestones for 2011-2012.

We appreciate the support, feedback, and contributions we receive from the Omeka community each day, and we hope you will continue to follow our progress in our next two endeavors.

After more than two years of planning and development, and six months of Alpha testing, CHNM is pleased to announce the public launch of Omeka.net Beta. Anyone may sign up for an account today.

Omeka.net is a hosted web service that brings standards-based online collections and exhibitions to the internet cloud. Simply create a username and password at http://omeka.net, and your online collection or exhibition website is up and running. Similar to cloud-based content management services offered by WordPress.com, Blogger, and PBWorks—but geared to the needs of scholarship and cultural heritage—no server or programming experience is required to launch an Omeka.net website. With Omeka.net, users can build digital exhibits, map photographs, collect memories from web audiences, or publish new scholarship in a few easy steps.

Omeka.net will offer five plans for users that include a range of options from building one site using a few plugins and themes to deploying an unlimited number of sites that uses an extensive set of add-ons and designs. These plans, including a basic free option, are available to accommodate a variety of individual and institutional users.

Omeka.net is an outgrowth of the Omeka project, in partnership with Minnesota Historical Foundation and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Library of Congress, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

Omeka is now supported by JumpBox, a service that simplifies the process of installing open source software. JumpBox gives you the option to run a virtual machine locally on your Windows/Mac/Linux personal computer, or to purchase website hosting that includes Omeka already installed.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to use Omeka with Jumpbox, check out this informative screencast created by Sean Tierney of Jumpbox, or go ahead and download the Omeka 1.1 Jumpbox.

We’re excited to be working with Jumpbox, which is part of our larger effort to provide one-click installs of Omeka. We encourage you to contact your web host and ask for Omeka support.