Omeka

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.

Examples of page templates in the Korematsu theme

Page with Hero - No page navigation

Default

Default - No Page Navigation

Full Width - No Page Navigation

Newsletter: October 2025

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Message from the Director

Dear Friends,

With the fracturing of social media in recent years, all of us have faced challenges with keeping in touch and abreast of new developments in the field of digital cultural heritage. This is certainly true for the Omeka Team, where we miss the lively dialogue and sharing that our users formerly engaged in on Twitter. While our forums provide an open space for people to ask questions and to get assistance, sustained dialogue is hard in that space.

In an effort to strengthen the avenues of communication between the development team and the many users, designers, and developers out in the world who regularly work with Omeka, next month we are launching a series of quarterly community calls. Every three months we will invite all interested parties to join us for a brief presentation of our current work followed by an open dialogue about the platforms. We want to know what you are working on, what your stumbling blocks are, and what you would like the platforms to do in the future.

I hope you’ll join us on December 4 and share your work!

With my best wishes for a peaceful holiday season, Sharon

New Developments

Last month, the Omeka Team released a set of add-ons that facilitate the integration of all Omeka platforms with the Local Contexts project. Local Contexts Labels allow Indigenous communities and local organizations to clearly articulate the conditions for sharing, use, and future engagement around collections and data in which they have an interest. Local Contexts Notices enable data and collections holders to mark that they recognize Indigenous rights and interests in those materials and, furthermore, to signal that they want to collaborate with Indigenous stakeholders to articulate the appropriate terms and conditions related to those materials. Once the parties have embarked up on that collaboration, together they can display the results of their deliberations using the Local Contexts Labels.

Since Omeka’s very first release, the platforms have been designed to support open access to both digitalized collections materials and the robust metadata that describes those collections. We have worked hard to encourage standards and protocols that facilitate the free exchange, aggregation, and reuse of materials. Our recent post on supporting FAIR data principles is just our latest articulation of this commitment to open access. However, the preferential option for open access cannot be absolute or uncritical. The sharing of collections and data involving Indigenous peoples, their interests, their archives, and their cultural heritage materials necessitates collaboration with those communities on the degree and manner of access which is appropriate. The Local Contexts Labels and Notices help facilitate that collaboration and will enable Omeka users to engage in more responsible collections stewardship, and we are pleased to be able to support our users in upholding these principles in their digital cultural heritage projects with Omeka.net, Omeka Classic, and Omeka S.

See also… The Static Site Export plugin for exporting static sites is now available for download and use with your Omeka S sites.

Spotlight: International Center for the Arts of the Americas Documents Project

This quarter’s Omeka newsletter Spotlight is the ICAA Documents Project. This Omeka S project houses over 9,000 documents of 20th and 21st-century art in Latin America, the Caribbean, and among US Latino communities. Cutting across national and cultural boundaries, the digital archive and accompanying publications provide an intellectual foundation for the exhibition, collection, and interpretation of art produced along this cultural axis. This digital archive provides global access to archival materials while simultaneously connecting geographically dispersed scholars and other producers of knowledge. Vocabularies include a custom ontology for the Archive data structure and a custom vocabulary server for values integrated into the ValueSuggest module. There is also a spinoff site, The CAYC Files, for a particular archive subset. 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: Matthew McKinley

Role: Developer

How long have you been with Omeka?

Since August 2020 – a little over 5 years

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

Mostly I work on modules–I’ve developed the Item Carousel Block, Persistent Identifiers and Data Repository Connector modules for Omeka S, among others.

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

I earned my MSIS and have worked in the Library/Archives/Museums world my whole career, and I love how many kind, clever people I encounter doing interesting and important work. The Omeka team and user community is absolutely no exception. As an example, I’ve recently been working with the Local Contexts team to see about integrating Traditional Knowledge Labels and Notices into Omeka S, and have found the unique informational and rights management needs of indigenous communities just fascinating.

What’s a fun fact about you?

Over the pandemic, my partner and I somehow decided to watch every movie Nicolas Cage has ever made, in release order. With over 100 screen credits, it took a while! It started as kind of a joke, but by the end we were more than impressed by how entertaining and watchable he is as an actor in even the worst film. Truly a National Treasure (pun fully intended).

Omeka in the World

The Omeka Team was thrilled to return to the Museum Computing Network conference in Minneapolis this October, after a hiatus. We launched the Omeka.net service with an announcement at the 2010 conference, and it was enriching to reconnect with so many old friends and share the news of all the features and developments for Omeka Classic and Omeka S over the last several years.

Museum strategist and evaluator, Kate Haley Goldman visits the Omeka table at MCN to learn about recent new offerings for the platforms.

Upcoming Event: December Community Call

Join us for our first Community Call on December 4 from 11:00am until 12:30pm EDT. We’ll discuss theming patterns and ways to use templates to customize the look and feel of your Omeka S site pages.

Come prepared to share a project you would like to showcase!

This will be the first of a quarterly series of conversations, so we hope to speak with you again in February, May, and August.

Local Contexts Integration with Omeka

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0400

This week the Omeka Team released a set of add-ons that facilitate the integration of all Omeka platforms with the Local Contexts project. Local Contexts Labels allow Indigenous communities and local organizations to clearly articulate the conditions for sharing, use, and future engagement around collections and data in which they have an interest. Local Contexts Notices enable data and collections holders to mark that they recognize Indigenous rights and interests in those materials and, furthermore, to signal that they want to collaborate with Indigenous stakeholders to articulate the appropriate terms and conditions related to those materials. Once the parties have embarked up on that collaboration, together they can display the results of their deliberations using the Local Contexts Labels.

Since Omeka’s very first release, the platforms have been designed to support open access to both digitalized collections materials and the robust metadata that describes those collections. We have worked hard to encourage standards and protocols that facilitate the free exchange, aggregation, and reuse of materials. Our recent post on supporting FAIR data principles is just our latest articulation of this commitment to open access. However, the preferential option for open access cannot be absolute or uncritical. The sharing of collections and data involving Indigenous peoples, their interests, their archives, and their cultural heritage materials necessitates collaboration with those commmunities on the degree and manner of access which is appropriate. The Local Contexts Labels and Notices help facilitate that collaboration and will enable Omeka users to engage in more responsible collections stewardship.

The availability of the Local Contexts Labels and Notices represents our effort not only to support FAIR data principles but also to support CARE data principles. In 2019, the Research Data Alliance’s International Indigengous Data Sovereignty Interest Group defined those principles as:

Collective Benefit: Data ecosystems shall be designed and function in ways that enable Indigenous People to derive benefit from the data.

Authority to Control: Indigenous Peoples’ rights and interests in Indigenous data must be recognised and their authority to control such data be empowered. Indigenous data governance enables Indigenous Peoples and governing bodies to determine how Indigenous Peoples, as well as Indigenous lands, territories, resources, knowledges and geographical indicators, are represented and identified within data.

Responsibility: Those working with Indigenous data have a responsibility to share how those data are used to support Indigenous Peoples’ self-determination and collective benefit. Accountability requires meaningful and openly available evidence of these efforts and the benefits accruing to Indigenous Peoples.

Ethics: Indigenous Peoples’ rights and wellbeing should be the primary concern at all stages of the data life cycle and across the data ecosystem.

We are pleased to be able to support our users in upholding these principles in their digital cultural heritage projects with Omeka.net, Omeka Classic, and Omeka S.

Omeka and FAIR data principles

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0400

The Omeka Team has long had a commitment to interoperability and reuse facilitated through structured metadata – from the principles that fueled Omeka Classic’s initial design to the decision to put linked open data at the heart of the data model for Omeka S. As a result, we are committed to supporting the efforts of our users to adhere to the guidelines laid out in the FAIR Principles. At the same time, we recognize that the world of cultural heritage stewardship is implicated in centuries of dispossession and colonial appropriation, so we are equally invested in supporting efforts to implement the CARE principles for Indigenous Data Governance across our platforms. (We’ll discuss that in a subsequent post.)

FAIR Principles

Born out of an initial workshop in Leiden in 2014, the FAIR Guiding Principles were articulated and refined, then published in Scientific Data in 2016. The principles were designed to facilitate the creation and publication of research and collections data that is accessible and reusable both through human and machine discovery. Over the last dozen years, data management plans have become a regular feature of both government and private funding applications. In this way, digital humanists and stewards of digital cultural heritage collections have become accustomed to articulating a concrete plan for stewarding their data beyond the life of basic project development. Nonetheless, the products of that work have often been heterogeneous and difficult for other scholars to work with. Adherence to FAIR principles helps to smooth the edges of that heterogeneity and to increase the likelihood of data reuse. The principles “act as a guide to data publishers and stewards to assist them in evaluating whether their particular implementation choices are rendering their digital research artefacts Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.”

Omeka Classic’s architecture was set in the mid-2000s and as such does not offer as many FAIR-supporting elements as Omeka S, which was designed as a linked open data application in the mid-2010s. Nonetheless, both platforms have a number of features built into their core and available extensions that facilitate the publication of FAIR digital assets.

This work is as much social as it is technical. All description and data work happens in a context, and that context is essential to governing the way that the data is formed, published, and reused. Consensus on description standards must be achieved within a community of practice so that members of that community invest in and deploy the shared methods for knowledge representation within their field. As a result, a number of the key FAIR principles can only be determined by users and their colleagues. Once communities have settled on their approach to description, individual projects can use the FAIR Implementation Profile to evaluate the success of satisfying FAIR goals with their work. These guiding questions can help users understand the decisions they need to make to satisfy the principles of the model.

FAIR in the context of Omeka Classic and Omeka S

The following is an effort to articulate the Omeka features that support the individual elements of the FAIR principles as laid out in the implementation profile. The profile refers to both metadata and datasets. In Omeka Classic and Omeka S, datasets can be packaged and attached as media/files to Items, thus enjoying all of the descriptive capacity of Items in each platform.

Findable

F1. (Meta)data are assigned a globally unique and persistent identifier

What globally unique, persistent, resolvable identifier service do you use for metadata records, and/or datasets?

Omeka S: ARK (via EZID) or DOI (via DataCite) are available with the Persistent Identifier module; Omeka S also produces root installation URIs.
Omeka Classic: No persistent identifier feature.

F2. Data are described with rich metadata (defined by R1 below)

Which metadata schemas do you use for findability?

Omeka S: Omeka S comes pre-loaded with the following vocabularies: Dublin Core; Dublin Core Type; Bibliographic Ontology; and Friend of a Friend. Users can import any other LOD Vocab that might be domain appropriate.
Omeka Classic: Dublin Core metadata element set is used to structure description for items, files, and collections.

F3. Metadata clearly and explicitly include the identifier of the data they describe

What is the schema that links the persistent identifiers of your data to the metadata description?

Omeka S: JSON-LD represents PIDs in an Item description property value. In the API output, context is provided: media have stable URIs for the installation, Item sets are identified, and Sites where content is published are listed. These are stable to the installation, but not technically PIDs.
Omeka Classic: No persistent identifier feature.

F4. (Meta)data are registered or indexed in a searchable resource

In which registry are your metadata records, and/or datasets indexed?

User determined. The United States does not have a single aggregator of digital cultural heritage data. Europeana has a data repository (data model) that serves that purpose for the European Union. Other regions and fields have a range of options that support and disseminate their work.

Accessible

A1. (Meta)data are retrievable by their identifier using a standardised communications protocol

A1.1 The protocol is open, free, and universally implementable

Which standardized communication protocol do you use for metadata records, and/or datasets?

Omeka S: https and REST API.
Omeka Classic: https and REST API.

A1.2 The protocol allows for an authentication and authorisation procedure, where necessary

Which authentication & authorisation service do you use for metadata records, and/or datasets?

Omeka S: https and REST API.
Omeka Classic: https and REST API.

A2. Metadata are accessible, even when the data are no longer available

Which metadata preservation policy do you use? (Metadata preservation policy)

Omeka S: User determined; Files can be removed at any time.
Omeka Classic: User determined; Files can be removed at any time.

Interoperable

I1. (Meta)data use a formal, accessible, shared, and broadly applicable language for knowledge representation.

Which knowledge representation languages (allowing machine interoperation) do you use for metadata records, and/or datasets? (Knowledge representation language)

Omeka S: By default, Omeka embeds JSON-LD in resource browse and show pages for the purpose of machine-readable metadata discovery. Can be disabled in the Installation Administrative Settings for Display. Also, the Output Formats module can visibly expose supplementary formats for the human visitor: The options appear as follows: JSON-LD (application/ld+json); Notation3 (text/n3); N-Triples (application/n-triples); RDF/XML (application/rdf+xml); Turtle (text/turtle). Finally, all information and formats are also API accessible.
Omeka Classic: Standard output formats include omeka-xml, omeka-json, dcmes-xml, json, and rss2, which are all API accessible. Additionally, there is an available OAI-PMH Repository plugin.

I2. (Meta)data use vocabularies that follow FAIR principles

Which structured vocabularies do you use to annotate your metadata records, and/or datasets?

Omeka S: User determined; see Value Suggest module (available Vocabularies).
Omeka Classic: User determined; see LC Suggest plugin.

I3. (Meta)data include qualified references to other (meta)data

Which models, schema(s) do you use for your metadata records, and/or datasets?

Omeka S: User determined through the creation of Resource Templates from any uploaded LOD Vocab.
Omeka Classic: Dublin Core metadata element set is used to structure description of items, files, and collections; users may add appropriate elements to Item description through the use of Item Type metadata.

Reusable

R1. (Meta)data are richly described with a plurality of accurate and relevant attributes

R1.1. (Meta)data are released with a clear and accessible data usage license
Which usage license do you use for your metadata records, and/or datasets?

Omeka S: User determined. See the Rights Statement vocabulary in the Value Suggest module.
Omeka Classic: User determined.

R1.2. (Meta)data are associated with detailed provenance

Which metadata schemas do you use for describing the provenance of your metadata records, and/or datasets?

Omeka S: User determined through the creation of Resource Templates from any uploaded LOD Vocab (e.g. DCAT, PROV-O, ODRL). Could be applied to Item Sets or directly in the Item metadata.
Omeka Classic: User determined through the augmentation of Item Type metadata.

R1.3. (Meta)data meet domain-relevant community standards

Who is the community, and what are their domain-relevant community standards?

Omeka S: User determined.
Omeka Classic: User determined.

Newsletter: July 2025

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Message from the Director

Dear Friends,

As we reach the close of July, the Omeka Team has been moving forward on all fronts. The Summer Intensives with Dani Wilcutt are finishing up their eight weeks of work (registration for the Fall courses is now open). The Development team is approaching new releases for the core of both Omeka Classic and Omeka S, and half a dozen new add-ons are rolling out for both platforms.

These developments are part of our effort to make sure that, even though Omeka Classic and Omeka S are well-established elements of the digital humanities and digital cultural heritage infrastructure, we continue to work hard to be responsive to your interests and needs as users. For us to do that, we need to hear from you about your work. What projects do you have underway? What kind of sites would you like to build? What functionality do your users need? Often we only hear the answers to these questions in face to face meetings. I was lucky to have some engagement of this sort during the DH2025 Omeka minicon. The valuable insights and aspirations that the participants brought to our day together will come right back into our development meetings as we plan for new features over the next year.

Of course, not every Omeka user can manage to come to an in-person event, so we’re brainstorming other ways to surface community voices. One current option is via our forums. We invite you to share your work and your plans in the “Community Contributions” section. Another option is to join us at the Omeka S Developer event in Luxembourg that is noted at the end of this newsletter. We’re on the look out for other approaches, so keep your eyes open on the socials for other opportunities to engage.

With my best wishes for a restorative summer, Sharon

New Developments

Recently, the Development Team released the Activity Log module. This module allows you to gather information about changes made in the Omeka interface into one table. Now, you can view all changes made to resources, sites, installation settings, users, and module-added data points.

Once you activate the module in the admin dashboard, Activity Log has no required settings. Activity Log will record events when it is active. The table will reflect all changes made in the installation by all users. It only lists events that modify; it does not include read-only events.

Users with permission to view the Activity Log can filter events. Users may filter the events using the multiple available filters, including ID, user, user role, IP, event name, resource, resource ID, from, and before.

See also… The OHMS Embed plugin for Omeka Classic is now available for download and use with your self-hosted Omeka Classic sites. Also, the OHMS Embed plugin is available for all subscription levels on Omeka.net.

Spotlight: Lewis & Clark Senior Art Archive

This quarter’s Omeka newsletter Spotlight is the Lewis & Clark Senior Art Archive! This Omeka Classic site highlights art works from almost five hundred undergraduate students at Lewis & Clark College. The art works are organized into collections for each academic year, dating from 1992 to the present. At the end of each academic year, the Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art hosts the Senior Art Exhibition, the culmination of artwork made by the graduating seniors in the art department at the end of their undergraduate journey at Lewis & Clark College. This site is developed and maintained by Watzek Library, and is a joint venture with the Art Department. 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: Jim Safley

Role: Senior Developer & Metadata Specialist

How long have you been with Omeka?

2007 (since the beginning)

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

Omeka S: Core code, Mapping, Value Suggest, Custom Vocab, File Sideload, Collecting, Numeric Data Types, Extract Text, Faceted Browse, Scripto, Zotero Import and many others. Omeka Classic: Collection Tree, Docs Viewer, Scripto, Item Relations, Simple Vocab, Derivative Images, Item Order, Zotero Import and many others.

Do you have a favorite project you’ve worked on or just a favorite part of working with the Omeka team/community? I enjoy working in open-source software with a team of witty, creative, and intelligent people. I enjoy building free tools for scholars, students, and cultural heritage institutions. I enjoy watching the Omeka community grow and find new ways to use and improve the software.

What’s a fun fact about you?

I had no plans to become a software developer. Over 20 years ago, after graduating with a history degree, I stumbled into a job opportunity with the future creators of Omeka that continues to be fruitful to this day.

Omeka in the World

The Omeka Team was thrilled to participate in DH2025 in Lisbon! We enjoyed getting to interact with our community through the pre-conference session, Doing DH with Omeka: a Mini-con for Omeka Users and Developers, on July 14th. Omeka users, designers, and developers have indicated an interest in growing the collaborative community.

Valérie Adriaens, Roberto Pareja, and Pierre Williame discuss data modeling issues at the DH2025 Omeka Users and Developers Mini-con.

This in-person mini-con was open to all DH2025 registrants for DH2025 and brought together novice and experienced users of the Omeka platforms, and designers and developers who work with the software to share their knowledge and experiences creating well-described, publicly accessible repositories of digitized cultural heritage materials and with mobilizing those materials to communicate sophisticated interpretation. During the day-long meeting, participants had the opportunity to discuss their work, make plans for future projects, develop community relationships, and learn from one another.

Thank you to all contributors and sponsors of DH2025–we look forward to seeing you all at future conferences!

Upcoming Event: International Omeka S Developer Gathering

The Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), in collaboration with DARIAH-LU, is pleased to host an International Omeka S Developer Event from Wednesday, 3 September, to Friday, 5 September 2025, at the University of Luxembourg, Belval Campus.

Inspired by previous events, this year’s gathering will once again follow BarCamp principles, embracing an open, collaborative “unconference” format. There will be no keynote speeches or formal presentations, and no traditional workshops. Instead, the agenda will be co-created by you—the participants—ensuring that the sessions reflect the shared interests, challenges, and expertise of the community. Sessions will consist of breakout discussions, co-working groups, and hands-on problem-solving, all self-organized and participant-led. This format ensures an inclusive environment where all voices are heard and valued.

For more information and to register, visit: https://www.uni.lu/c2dh-en/events/international-omeka-s-developer-event/

Newsletter: April 2025

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Message from the Director

Dear Friends,

The last month in the United States has been extremely troubling for memory workers, scholars, students, and members of the public who work with and care about cultural heritage.

The hearts of the whole Omeka Team go out to every individual and organization who has had a federal grant cancelled, and to the many, many dedicated public servants at the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Park Service who have had their jobs eliminated.

In this time of upheaval, we want to provide some context about how the Omeka Team operates and also the safety of your work with our software.

Omeka and all of its associated offerings are fully independent of grant funding and are not affiliated with any university. Omeka is sustained through the proceeds derived from Omeka.net subscriptions and from the fees associated with the services we offer. The project is a subsidiary of Digital Scholar, a company founded in 2009 to support and sustain key open source scholarly communications and cultural heritage projects, including Zotero, Tropy, Sourcery, and PressForward. As such, Omeka Classic, Omeka S, and their associated add-ons will always remain open source, and free for you to use.
As an independent project, work and services provided by the Omeka Team are not impeded by any current executive orders. If you have a project that you have developed on Omeka.net with your subscription or if you host Omeka’s open source software with us or an independent internet service provider, your work is yours, and it is safe from intrusion. Of course, if funding or hosting for your Omeka project is provided by an institution, the administration’s policies could affect that institution and thereby your project.

Our primary goal at Omeka is to help you build the sites you want to build with your digital cultural heritage. That might mean digitizing and describing a collection of 19th century letters. Or, it might mean launching a digital collecting project that documents a local community’s struggle with deindustrialization. It might even mean telling the stories of federal workers who have lost their jobs. No matter how you use Omeka, we are here to support you.

With my solidarity. Sharon

New Developments

Five questions with Jim Safley about the static site export addons which are under development:

Tell us about the Static Site Export add-ons you’ve been working on.

The add-ons (an Omeka S module and Omeka Classic plugin) will migrate Omeka sites into static sites. A static site is a website that is delivered to a browser exactly as stored, in contrast to a dynamic site which is generated by a web application (like Omeka). The idea here is to drop technical dependencies and improve performance and security. This is part of a larger effort by Omeka to provide our users options for the long-term preservation and access of content stored on their installations.

What kinds of functionality or interface could a user expect to be different in the exported version of a site?

We aim to minimize functional and visual differences between an Omeka site and its static site. Even so, there will be differences. The extent of these differences will vary from site to site, but the basic structure will be the same.

How did you select Hugo as the output format for the export?

Hugo fits all of our requirements for a static site generator. It’s open source. It has extremely fast build time. Its templating language is powerful and flexible. It’s relatively easy to use. In addition, the larger Hugo community provides plenty of ways to enhance the user experience of static sites, including search, analytics, and comment engines.

Why do you and the Omeka Team think this work is important?

We know that the long-term preservation and accessibility of Omeka content is an important part of our users’ strategic needs. We want to help our users manage risks like data degradation, technological obsolescence, and loss of funding by facilitating the migration of content to a format that minimizes these risks.

When can we expect to see these add-ons released?

The Omeka S module is completed and in testing. We will release it once testing is finished and all critical issues are resolved. The Omeka Classic plugin is under development. We will release it once work and testing is done.

Spotlight: Gent Gemapt

This quarter’s Omeka newsletter Spotlight is Gent Gemapt. This project combines deep mapping with archival materials that results in a robust digital project built using Omeka S. Using urban gazetteers of the city of Ghent as a foundation, this project unites a variety of archival materials to create a multi-modal, space-based narrative connecting various elements of the city’s robust cultural heritage. Visitors to the site can participate in creating transcriptions as well as date, describe, and identify materials from various museums and archives. The project uses custom resource templates to integrate information from the gazetteers, and the mapping page is built using a combination of Leaflet, Omeka S, IIIF and OpenStreetMap. Gent Gemapt is funded by the Flemish Government - Departement Cultuur Jeugd Sport en Media. Collaborators on the project include Ghent University Library, AMSAB-ISG, Liberas, STAM Gent, Archief Gent, Huis van Alijn en Industriemuseum. GhentCDH finances the development of underlying technologies and the Urban Gazetteer with support of Clariah-Vlaanderen. 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: Dani Willcutt

Role: Training Specialist

How long have you been with Omeka?

Since October 2024, but I used and taught undergraduate and graduate students how to use the platform as well. One example is this class website devoted to the Battle of Prairie Grove in the U.S. Civil War.

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

I have also worked with the Roberson Project at Sewanee (the University of the South) as the Digital Humanities Lead Developer for Sewanee Praises (where one of my tasks was building this community-focused site)- Sewanee Praises is “a collaborative academic initiative involving teams of architecture and design students and faculty from Virginia Commonwealth and Virginia Tech universities in partnership with the people of Sewanee’s historic African American neighborhoods, and supported by the University of the South’s Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation.” I am also working at Matrix Center for Digital Humanities and Social Science at Michigan State where I am building a database of historical restaurant menus using Omeka-S (the project isn’t live yet but is named Menu Made America).

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

I really enjoy learning and using digital tools which I think translates into how I enjoy teaching with digital tools like the Omeka platforms. My favorite part of joining the Omeka team is being able to enjoy my work and what I do. Part of what I enjoy is being able to help others (people, institutions, programs) to design and create their own projects and to bring them to fruition.

What’s a fun fact about you?

I enjoy painting and crafting, including paper crafts and making (and teaching with) zines.

Omeka in the World

The Omeka team had a blast getting to talk with our community at this year’s National Council on Public History Annual Meeting that was held in Montréal last month! Thank you so much to the organizers for putting on such an amazing event.

Starting clockwise from the upper left corner, the photo collage features: Ken Albers, Jim Safley, Na Li, and Krista McCracken.

Upcoming Event: Course Info Session

Join us for the Omeka Intensive Course Info Session on Thursday, May 15th at 12:00 PM EDT. In this webinar, Omeka instructor Dani Willcutt will provide a brief overview of the Omeka Classic and Omeka S intensive courses and will address audience questions. We will circulate the Zoom link the day of the event. Register now!