Omeka

Newsletter: July 2026

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Message from the Director

A note from the editor:

Hello, Omeka Community!

I hope you all are having a relaxing and restorative summer. Sharon is currently out of the office attending a conference (I hope you said hello if you were also at DH 2026!) and embarking on a well-deserved vacation, so there is no Director’s Note this issue. However, we still wanted to share some exciting new developments and upcoming events with you.

Below, you’ll find updates regarding Omeka Classic’s Geolocation plugin and a new Web Archive module for Omeka S, which was thoroughly tested and documented by our featured team member, Allana Mayer.

We have also released the schedule for our Fall intensive courses, and are offering a sneak peek at the topics for our upcoming continuation of the workshop series we started in the Spring.

I’m looking forward to chatting with you at the upcoming community call. If we don’t see you then, Sharon will be back in your inbox in the October newsletter.

Wishing you all the best,
Katherine Knowles
Omeka Community Engagement Associate

New Developments

The Geolocation plugin for Omeka Classic now has the option for using a custom map overlay. Add a specific image, already mapped and uploaded elsewhere, as a display layer on all the maps of your site. For example, you can add a historical map that shows relevant areas as they looked in another time.

You can use either a Tile URL Template or a WMS Base URL. For WMS, you will need to select layers, and you can optionally choose specific styles and specify whether they should be transparent. For both maps, you specify the zoom range and provide an attribution.

The Web Archive module for Omeka S adds support for ingesting and replaying web archive files as media. Web archives are captures of web pages or entire sites at a point in time. The module uses the ReplayWeb.page player to replay them in embedded players inside public pages.

Web archive files can be uploaded as media attached to items. They can also be ingested by providing a URL to a publicly available online web archive. Once a web archive is uploaded, the player should appear immediately in the media page on the admin side, and be visible on any public sites that include the item.

Spotlight: Eileen Southern and the Music of Black Americans

This quarter’s Omeka newsletter Spotlight features the Eileen Southern and the Music of Black Americans digital exhibit. This project focuses on Eileen Jackson Southern and her book, The Music of Black Americans, which inspired the academic subfield of Black music studies.This exhibit highlights archival materials including videos, images, and interviews from the collection that Southern left to the Harvard University Archives, and it introduces visitors to Southern’s life and legacy. The exhibit is just one part of the Eileen Southern Initiative, which is a multi-year, multi-part, collaborative project at Harvard University honoring Eileen Southern. The project is supported by Harvard Library, the Division of Arts and Humanities of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Department of Music. Explore the collections and learn more about the project today. Explore the Site

Share your work with us for inclusion in our directories, and for a possible future Spotlight!

Meet the Team

Name: Allana Mayer

Role: Technical Writer

How long have you been with Omeka?

4 years

What work have you done that our community would be familiar with?

I keep the user manuals up-to-date, test new updates to the code, and occasionally pop up on the forums or in webinars and training.

Do you have a favorite project you’ve worked on or just a favorite part of working with the Omeka team/community?

I like learning from frequent questions what can be improved either directly in the Omeka interfaces or by better documentation and guidance. I really love working with our developers, who turn my rambling feedback into great solutions and new features.

What’s a fun fact about you?

I’m the sole Canadian on the team!

Omeka in the World

The Omeka Team attended DH 2026 in Daejeon, South Korea! Our director, Sharon Leon, was thrilled to see you all as you came to say hello, learned more about our current projects, and asked your questions.

If you didn’t have the chance to stop by, no worries! We’ll be in Providence, Rhode Island this September for the NCPH annual meeting and we’re looking forward to seeing you there.

Upcoming Events

Fall Intensive Courses

Our next round of eight-week Omeka Classic and Omeka S courses will begin September 22 and September 23, respectively. To enroll in an online course, click the “Enroll” link for Classic or S on our training website. You will then be prompted to create an account in our learning management system. Once you have created an account, you will be able to select the course you would like to enroll in. You will then be invoiced, and upon submission of payment your spot will be reserved. After that you will receive an invite to Moodle, our course training website. Courses are limited to 20 participants to assure adequate instructor support, so sign up today!

Community Call: Sustainability

Join us for our next Community Call on August 13 at 11:00am EDT. We’ll discuss a variety of topics around the theme of “Sustainability,” including the project life cycle and plugins and modules that can help facilitate project preservation.

Come prepared to share a project you would like to showcase! You do not have to have a project related to the topic to participate in the project showcase.

The Omeka Community Call is a quarterly series of conversations, so we hope to speak with you again in November. If there are any topics you would like to discuss, let us know in this survey.

Preview: Upcoming Workshops

We will continue our series of topic-specific workshops this fall and spring. There will be two new additions to the class lineup. “Omeka Classic in the Classroom” focuses on techniques and ideas for bringing digital methods into the classroom using Omeka Classic. “Omeka S for Researchers” will teach participants how to incorporate Omeka S, Zotero, and Tropy into your project lifecycle, from lit review to the archives to building a public-facing site. Stay tuned for exact dates and times! Visit our website for the most up-to-date information.

May 14th Community Call Recording Now Available

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Community Call: Discovery - 14 May 2026

Newsletter: April 2026

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Message from the Director

Dear Friends,

We strongly feel that each Omeka installation that is launched should have a corresponding preservation plan. As such, the Omeka Team has spent the last couple of years thinking about how to make the work of preservation easier.

The Exports addons allow administrators to select a universe of resources and export the related metadata as a CSV or a JSON-LD file (Omeka Classic / Omeka S).
The Static Site Export addons allow administrators to select an installation or a site and transform it into a Hugo static site (Omeka Classic / Omeka S).
Alternatively, you might consider just exporting your installation database, and zipping up a copy of the files in your Omeka installation directory. This preserves the full installation so that it can be relaunched elsewhere.
Finally, you might consider routes to preserve the exact experience of your installation. To do so, you could create a WARC file that captures your work using Webrecorder tools.

While you should certainly have a local copy of your work, you should have at least two copies offsite, and hopefully one of those should be in a preservation grade repository. Any of the artifacts mentioned above are ripe for deposit in your local institutional repository for preservation. If you don’t have access to a local IR, you could make an account at KCWorks and deposit there.

Whatever route you choose, please take a few minutes to ensure that your work is preserved for future access!

With my best wishes, Sharon

New Developments

Recently, the Omeka Team has been hard at work trying to finish up a development arc related to serving archives. An ArchivesSpace Connector module for Omeka S is now available.

The ArchivesSpace Connector module allows you to connect an Omeka S instance to a ArchivesSpace repository to import items and item sets from that repository. This module works in conjunction with the Hierarchy module to build and maintain a structured tree of collections and containers from ArchivesSpace, faithfully representing your archival arrangements within Omeka. After importing information, Omeka S will maintain a connection back to the original source material, which allows you to refresh the information from the source when desired.

Now, the Dev team is working on building an add-on that will be compatible with Archivematica. The hope is that it will not simply act as a connector to import items to your Omeka site, but that it will be able to push items from your Omeka site to deposit. Stay tuned over the coming year to follow this development!

Spotlight: Documenting Ferguson

This quarter’s Omeka newsletter Spotlight is Documenting Ferguson, a freely available resource that seeks to preserve and make accessible the digital media captured and created by community members following the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014. This Omeka S project uses the Foundation theme and houses nearly 800 digital artifacts provided by community members, including images, video, and audio related to the various events in the aftermath throughout the St. Louis region. This project was created originally using Omeka Classic by the Washington University in St. Louis Libraries in collaboration with members of the community. Please note that users may encounter offensive or harmful language in this collection. Explore the collection and learn more about the project today. Explore the Site

Share your work with us for inclusion in our directories, and for a possible future Spotlight!

Meet the Team

Name: Avianna Miller

Role: Testing Associate

How long have you been with Omeka?

A little over a year!

What work have you done that our community would be familiar with?

I am involved in most things in the realm of accessibility! I test new releases and updates to ensure they are accessible and aid our planning and improvement processes as we seek to better extend access in all facets of Omeka.

Do you have a favorite project you’ve worked on or just a favorite part of working with the Omeka team/community?

Going from being an Omeka user to part of the team, it’s been especially enjoyable to test out and comment on new features firsthand. I also appreciate learning from the unique design, development, and UX-oriented perspectives of all members of the team as we work toward shared goals.

What’s a fun fact about you?

I am a lifelong vegetarian.

Omeka in the World

Come find us at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference! Sheila Brennan, the Director of Institutional Relations for Digital Scholar, will be in attendance at the conference on April 30 and May 1. She looks forward to talking with you about Omeka, but is also happy to give updates on other Digital Scholar developments related to Zotero, Tropy, Sourcery, and PressForward!

Upcoming Events

Join us on May 12th at 11am EDT for the final workshop in our new series. “Maps & Timelines for Omeka S” will help users tell a location-based story about your research, data, or collections to enhance your Omeka S Site. Visit our website for more information on how to sign up, as well as to explore other training opportunities.
The next Omeka Community Call is scheduled for May 14th at 11:00am EDT and will be on the theme of “Discovery.” Come prepared to share a project you would like to showcase! Register now.
Our next round of eight-week Omeka Classic and Omeka S courses will begin June 9 and June 10, respectively. Visit our website to learn more and enroll.

New Preservation Plugins for Omeka Classic

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0400

As part of the ongoing effort to support and encourage long-term preservation of Omeka installations, Jim Safley has designed and released two new plugins for Omeka Classic:

Static Site Export: This plugin allows a Super User to export a flattened copy of your Omeka Classic public site. Using Hugo, you can rebuild a simplified version of your site that will maintain most of your page elements and all of your resources. Static sites can be useful as a backup and record of your site’s content, and for reducing server load for legacy web projects.
Exports: This plugin allows logged-in users to create a downloadable export of metadata associated with Omeka Classic items, collections, files, and exhibits. This can be in CSV or JSON format.

Consider using these plugins today to assure that you have preservation artifacts of your work for simple back up or for deposit in an institutional repository.

ArchivesSpace Connector Released

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Recently, we released the ArchivesSpace Connector module for Omeka S. The module uses the ArchiveSpace API and a collection identifier to import Archival Objects as Omeka Items. When used with the Hierarchy module, the module can also maintain the ArchivesSpace collection structure by importing collections/series/subseries as hierarchically organized Item Sets.

Developed by Matthew McKinley, this module was the result of collaboration and consultation with users in the wider Omeka S community. Many thanks to Arden Kirland, and our friends at the University of Missouri - Kansas City for discussing their use cases and requirements!

February 12th Community Call Recording Now Available

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Community Call: Archives - 12 February 2026

Newsletter: January 2026

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Message from the Director

Happy New Year, Omekans!

Since its inception, one of our key goals for Omeka has been for it to facilitate the digital publishing goals of as many people, organizations, and projects as possible. That goal of democratic access has driven our approach to open source development, internationalization, and user-driven localization. Significantly, it has also driven our approach to creating accessible interfaces. The team has been on a multi-year journey to update and document the accessibility of the platforms. You can see evidence of that always-ongoing work by reviewing the accessibility statements and current VPATs for Omeka.net, Omeka Classic, and Omeka S.

We know that making open source software opens up a world of possibilities for users to roll their own installations of Omeka, but we also realize that the ease of a reasonably priced software-as-a-service, like Omeka.net for Omeka Classic users, is essential to lowering barriers to entry for those with less technical experience. Over 2026 we will be working hard to offer that “sign-up and go” experience to those who want to work with Omeka S.

Finally, we recognize that having access to training and professional development can really make it possible for users to get new projects off the ground. Keep your eyes open for a host of new 1 and 2 session offerings that might be just what you need to move forward with your work!

I hope you’ll join us for all the new developments to come in 2026.

With my best wishes for strength and perseverance,

Sharon

New Developments

In December, the Omeka Team hosted its first community call on the theme of design, with a particular focus on accessibility. In addition to hearing from many of our community members about their own projects, Omeka UI/UX developer Nelson Amaya presented on page templates and Omeka Lead UI/UX Developer Kim Nguyen presented on making accessible patterns in Omeka. This included an overview of the accessibility audits happening across Omeka platforms, along with the additional training the Team is undergoing to enhance their design skills for better compatibility with assistive technology. Additionally, discussion covered how individuals can take steps to make their sites more accessible through customizing color contrast, text size, and adding alt text.

Next month, Nguyen will post additional updates on the work our design team is doing as a follow-up to the community call. The upcoming post will demonstrate advanced authoring techniques within Omeka S’s page builder. The goal is to highlight how site authors can create structured pages with visual interest using features including the grid layout, block settings, and block templates. We hope this will help our community learn easier ways to construct and manage elements like hero images, embedded galleries, and highlighted callouts.

However, this just scratches the surface of the work happening behind the scenes to make Omeka a more accessible platform. Last year, Avianna Miller joined the team, bringing with her an extensive background in accessibility testing. Miller and Nguyen have helped the team develop a sustainable testing approach for all updates and releases, ensuring that accessibility best practices are integrated into testing guidelines through an access-oriented lens. Omeka not only complies with but also strives to exceed the latest WCAG standards, aiming for Level AA compliance in our remediations and eventual conformance with Level AAA. To this end, the Omeka Team is conducting more frequent holistic accessibility audits internally and planning more steady, maintained VPAT releases.

This year, plans are underway to collaborate with Omeka Technical Writer Allana Mayer to update user manuals, providing users with a more comprehensive understanding of Omeka platforms’ built-in accessibility features and how to maintain and expand accessibility during the authoring process. There are also plans for navigation guides that will better consolidate information on Omeka’s standardized accessibility features and provide layout navigation tips for assistive technology users.

Spotlight: The Joseph S. Freeman Archive

This quarter’s Omeka newsletter Spotlight is the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America’s Joseph S. Freeman Archive. This Omeka .net project houses over a thousand digitized images from the million item collection documenting the history of American motorsports. The Archive includes the work of more than thirty photographers and collectors covering Indy Cars, NASCAR, Formula 1, Sprint Cars, IMSA, SCCA, Le Mans, Drag Racing, and more. Explore the collections and learn more about the project today. Explore the Site

Share your work with us for inclusion in our directories, and for a possible future Spotlight!

Meet the Team

Name: Nelson Amaya

Role: Web Designer and Developer

How long have you been with Omeka?

About 3 years

What work have you done that our community would be familiar with? I built the “Freedom” and “Lively” themes for both Omeka Classic and Omeka S. I also built the “Am I an American or am I not” for the Korematsu team, and “Early Black Students at Yale” for the Yale team.

Do you have a favorite project you’ve worked on or just a favorite part of working with the Omeka team/community?

It’s been an amazing experience building modern themes on Omeka as open-source resources that are being used for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions.

What’s a fun fact about you?

I’m the lead vocalist of a metal band. I also love tattoos.

Omeka in the World

In December, the Omeka Team attended the Digital Scholar All Hands Meeting. This meeting took place in Washington D.C. and Luxembourg, and it allowed us to brainstorm and collaborate with the Zotero, Tropy, and Sourcery teams. This was also the first time some of our team had the chance to meet each other in person. We’re hoping to make this meeting a new tradition and give us the chance to more clearly imagine our users in the wider context of the Digital Scholar community.

Spring Intensive Courses Enrollment!

Our next round of eight-week Omeka Classic and Omeka S courses will begin February 10 and February 11, respectively. Click here to view course options, then click the enroll link for your desired course. You will then be prompted to create an account in our learning management system. Once you have created an account, you will be able to select the course you would like to enroll in. You will then be invoiced, and upon submission of payment your spot will be reserved. After that you will receive an invite to Moodle, our course training website. Courses are limited to 20 participants to assure adequate instructor support, so sign up today!

Upcoming Events

Join us for the first Community Call of 2026 on February 12 at 11:00am EST. This call will focus on the theme of archives. Come prepared to share a project you would like to showcase! Register here to get the Zoom information.
Our Intensive Courses instructor, Dani Willcutt, is offering a new series of workshops on a variety of topics related to Omeka Classic and S! Keep an eye on the Omeka training site and social media for registration information.
- Effective Exhibit Building in Omeka Classic and Omeka.net, Thursday March 12th 12-2:00 pm EDT
- Effective Site Building in Omeka S - Part One Planning and Design, Thursday March 26th 12-2:00 pm EDT
- Preparing Your Data for CSV Import in Omeka Classic and Omeka.net, Wednesday April 8th 10-11:30 am EDT
- Preparing Your Data for CSV Import in Omeka S, Wednesday April 15th 10-11:30 am EDT

Closing Out 2025

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

The hours are ticking down in 2025, and we hope that the entire Omeka community is going to take a well-earned break as we close out the year. The Omeka Team will be out of the office from December 24, 2025 to January 5, 2026.

But, before we turn to cooking, gathering with family, playing games, and reading, we want to make sure that you all know that we released a new version of Omeka S earlier this month. Version 4.2 includes support for PHP 8.4 and raises the required version to PHP 8.1.

In addtion to many many features for users and developers, the release offer a new feature for making “item stubs.” Creating sites that are based heavily around linking can be a little inefficient: in the middle of adding a book, you might realize you need a new item to represent the author, for example, and have to stop and start over, be very careful about the order you create things in, or operate in multiple tabs or windows at once. Stubs aim to ease this kind of workflow by letting you create new items while you’re editing or creating another item: where you previously could only select existing items, there’s now an option to create a new one using a simplified interface. The items created this way are full-fledged items that you can go back to edit or fill in later.

Also, you’ll see changes and updates that address accessibility, performance, internationalization/localization and more. To read about all the changes, check out the release notes.

In January, we’ll be back in touch with our exciting plans for 2026!

December 4th Community Call Recording Now Available

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Community Call: Design - 4 December 2025

Omeka S Page Templates

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Page templates, a feature introduced in Omeka S v4.1.0, is a game changer for theme developers looking for custom layouts per page, going beyond the standard cross-page template system that was applied by default to all pages in previous versions.

Thanks to this feature, the entire page can have a template selected by the author, with the choices coming from the current theme. Small differences in overall layout or completely custom pages can be created as page templates and exposed for site authors to use.

The “Korematsu” theme, a custom theme developed by Omeka for the “AM I AN AMERICAN OR AM I NOT?” website is a practical example of how page templates can be used.

Based on the website design and some specific needs per page, this theme offers 6 different page templates:

Default: the default template used in most of the pages.
No page navigation: Same as the default template, but excluding the page navigation controls.
Page with Hero: a template that adds a hero image (configured in the theme options) to the top of the page. In this specific site, it is used in the homepage (but not limited to it).
Page with Hero - No page navigation: Same as the template above, but excluding the page navigation controls.
Full Width: A template that allows contents to expand to the viewport full width (no boxed layout).
Full Width - No page navigation: Same as the template above, but excluding the page navigation controls.

Let’s dive deeper into page templates, how they were implemented in this specific site, and some use cases.

How to implement page templates

page_templates.template-filename = "[Template display name]"

For the Korematsu theme, we registered our custom page templates like this:

page_templates.no-page-nav = "No page navigation"
page_templates.page-with-hero = "Page with Hero"
page_templates.page-with-hero-no-page-nav = "Page with Hero - No page navigation"
page_templates.full-width = "Full width"
page_templates.full-width-no-page-nav = "Full width - No page navigation"

Create the template files within your theme directory, in view/common/page-template/ with the same names you defined in the step above, using the .phtml extension:

You can use application/view/omeka/site/page/show.phtml as a base for your custom page templates, then apply your custom code.

How to assign a page template to a page

Once your page template files are set and ready to go, you can assign them in the Omeka S dashboard:

Click on “Edit” on the page you want to assign the template to.
Click on the Configure Layout icon in the Layout options bar (1), in the right panel select the template (2):
Save and test the page with the custom template assigned.

Use cases

One of the custom page templates we are using in the Korematsu theme is “Page with Hero - No page navigation”. This is used in the homepage as we wanted to have a hero just in this page. However, since it is a template, it can be used in any other page if required.

Another requirement was to hide the page navigation controls in this page (and some other specific pages), so we created a variation of every template to exclude these controls.

To build this template we used the default template included in the Omeka S core (application/view/omeka/site/page/show.phtml) as basecode, and just modified it accordingly.

For example, to get rid of the page navigation controls on our custom template, we just deleted the portion of code that prints this:

<?php if ($showPagePagination): ?>
    <?php echo $this->sitePagePagination(); ?>
<?php endif; ?>

It is also a good practice to add a custom class to the body based on the current page template. This can be done in the same custom page template file:

$this->htmlElement('body')->appendAttribute('class', 'page-with-hero');

This is very helpful in case you want to assign custom specific styles to certain page templates.

Regarding the hero part, it is important to mention that page template code is rendered within the main content div (id=”main-content”). If you want to modify something outside this div based on the page template (which was the case for the Korematsu theme hero in the homepage per the design specs), you need to follow this approach:

In the custom template file, set the $page variable to the layout template:
```
$this->layout()->setVariable('page', $page);
```
This allows us to get the current page template in the layout.phtml file (where we wanted to add our Hero element).

In the layout.phtml file, get the current page template name:

$pageTemplate = isset($page) ? $page->layoutDataValue('template_name') : '';

Then, insert the partial (in this case, we called it banner) right before the main content div if the current page template name is page-with-hero:
```
<?php if (strpos($pageTemplate, 'page-with-hero') === 0): ?>
 <?php echo $this->partial('common/banner'); ?>
<?php endif; ?>
```
Now, whenever we assign the “Page with Hero” or “Page with Hero - No page navigation” template to any page, this code in the layout file will validate it and will render the banner partial.

Omeka

Newsletter: July 2026

Message from the Director

New Developments

Spotlight: Eileen Southern and the Music of Black Americans

Meet the Team

Omeka in the World

Upcoming Events

Fall Intensive Courses

Community Call: Sustainability

Preview: Upcoming Workshops

May 14th Community Call Recording Now Available

Community Call: Discovery - 14 May 2026

Newsletter: April 2026

Message from the Director

New Developments

Spotlight: Documenting Ferguson

Meet the Team

Omeka in the World

Upcoming Events

New Preservation Plugins for Omeka Classic

ArchivesSpace Connector Released

February 12th Community Call Recording Now Available

Community Call: Archives - 12 February 2026

Newsletter: January 2026

Message from the Director

New Developments

Spotlight: The Joseph S. Freeman Archive

Meet the Team

Omeka in the World

Spring Intensive Courses Enrollment!

Upcoming Events

Closing Out 2025

December 4th Community Call Recording Now Available

Community Call: Design - 4 December 2025

Omeka S Page Templates

How to implement page templates

How to assign a page template to a page

Use cases

Examples of page templates in the Korematsu theme

Page with Hero - No page navigation

Default

Default - No Page Navigation

Full Width - No Page Navigation