Feature List

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Omeka Classic 2.6.1 Feature List

Free, open-source, digital publishing suite for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, and cultural enthusiasts

  • Publish archives, collections, exhibits, teaching materials; provide ways for the public to interact with your sites.

No contracts or annual fees

  • Download and use the software for free.
  • Download and use plugins and themes for free.

Easy to use

  • Omeka Classic is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming.
  • Omeka Classic is a web application, making it accessible from any computer or mobile device with an internet connection.
  • Users say Omeka Classic is “simple,” “logical,” and “unscary.”

Strong community of documentation and support

  • Learn to use Omeka Classic with step-by-step tutorials, screencasts, and extensive developer and designer documentation for customizing sites.
  • Connect with other Omeka Classic users and the Omeka team through the Forum.
  • Track code development, fork and share back with the Omeka team on GitHub.

Extensible, scalable, and flexible

  • Omeka Classic can handle large collections of metadata and files: over 1 million items. The only limitations are on your own server.
  • Element sets for institution-specific metadata may be added.
  • Zend framework for PHP allows for customization.
  • Omeka Classic accepts and stores many types of files, including images, video, audio, multi-page documents and PDFs, presentation slides, etc. Individual items may contain multiple files.
  • Extend core functionality with dozens of available plugins, or build your own using Omeka Classic’s plugin API.

Standards-based metadata and web design

  • Every item, file, and collection contains fields for unqualified Dublin Core elements. Dublin Core is an internationally-recognized and widely-adopted schema.
  • Omeka Classic comes packaged with design themes that follow best practices in accessible web design, are section 508 compliant, have ARIA roles for screen readers, and are responsive to different screen sizes for ease of reading on tablets and mobile phones.

Customizable web design

  • Omeka Classic’s pre-packaged design themes can be quickly modified in the administrative interface by adding logos and a tagline, and by customizing the navigation.
  • It's easy to customize an installed theme by modifying the CSS, PHP, or HTML.
  • Custom themes can be built using Omeka Classic’s flexible development API.

Interoperable

  • Unqualified Dublin Core data, combined with Omeka Classic-generated feeds and OAI-PMH harvestable data, give Omeka Classic sites the ability to share data among different systems and with other Omeka Classic sites. The Dublin Core Extended plugin adds a full complement of all DCMI elements.

Data sharing

  • Share your Omeka Classic data through a variety of feeds including Atom, DCMES-XML, JSON, and RSS2. With the Dublin Core Extended plugin, RDF output is also available.
  • Every Omeka Classic site has a REST API enabled which makes your Omeka Classic data discoverable by outside applications.

Data migration

  • Populate an Omeka Classic site by adding items individually or batch adding with data migration and upload tools, such as the OAI-PMH harvester plugin, Dropbox plugin for files, and API, CSV, and Zotero importer plugins.

Internationalization of Omeka Classic code

  • Translations available in dozens of languages and anyone may submit new translations.

Non-Roman character support

  • Omeka Classic supports Unicode (UTF-8) that allows users to build sites with non-Roman characters, including scientific symbols that display properly in web browsers.

Re-purpose content

  • Enter or import item metadata once, then use items and metadata in multiple instances across your site, including exhibits.

Publish narratives using our exhibit builder

  • Create rich, interpretive exhibits in Exhibit Builder that combine items in your Omeka Classic site with narrative text.
  • Configure each exhibit with a different theme or logo.

Create and organize items into collections

Use controlled vocabularies

Community-source content

  • Scripto opens Dublin Core fields for transcriptions and metadata collection.
  • Contribution lets you collect stories, images, and other files from visitors.
  • Posters allows registered visitors to remix the content of your site.

Tag items and exhibits with keywords

  • Customize search to include items, collections, exhibits, and all web pages.
  • Create customized reports with a simple HTML export, or a PDF export that prints QR codes.

Display items on a map

  • Assign locations to items, and add maps to exhibits using Geolocation.

Analyze and annotate your items

Visitor Experience With an Omeka Classic Site

See the Omeka Classic Showcase for examples of site designs and experiences possible with an Omeka Classic site.

  • Visitors with a variety of web browsers, internet bandwidth, and devices can access your site because packaged themes are designed to be ADA compliant (section 508) and responsive to different screen sizes.
  • Visitors have multiple access points to browse your content by items, collections, exhibits, maps, and other pages.
  • Searching allows anyone to conduct keyword, Boolean, or exact match searches across all content, or to refine item searches to any Dublin Core metadata field, tag, collection, or item type.
  • Pre-packaged design themes offer logical website architecture for easy navigation.
  • Invite the public to submit materials, comment on items, and crowdsource metadata - even transcribe your collections - with Contribution, Commenting, and Scripto plugins.
  • Researchers can easily save Omeka Classic items and metadata to their Zotero libraries.
  • Let visitors share items with their social networks by adding the Social Bookmarking plugin.
  • Users may collect and annotate items with the Posters plugin.