A few commentators have noted that Omeka’s potential could extend far beyond small history museums, for instance to archaeology and ePortfolios. In fact we have always intended Omeka to be used not only for history museum exhibitions, but also by enthusiast collectors, scholars, libraries, and community groups in many fields–really anyone interested in collecting and displaying digital objects in rich visual and interpretive environments. One good example of Omeka’s flexibility is the community site braddockheritage.org, which was developed in concert with CHNM by local volunteers in the Braddock district of Fairfax County, VA.
As a free and open source product, what we really want for Omeka is for the community of users and developers to take the software in directions we haven’t even thought of. To this end, we encourage you to post your ideas in the forums, and as you use Omeka in new ways, we hope you will post personal accounts, use cases, and links there as well. Ultimately, we hope you will extend the software through new plugins and themes and give those add-ons back to the community by posting them in the soon-to-be-released add-ons directory. Omeka’s modal use case is a small history museum, but braddockheritage.org shows that it can be used for other purposes, even by individual and non-institutional users, to do fantastic things.