One installation shared by several museums?

Several local museums in the area are interested in publishing their exhibits & collections, and it would be efficient to use one installation for all. Is there a way to identify each Museum, and within each, its own Exhibits and Collections.

Sorry if this was covered previously but I didn't see the exact issue. If I were more experienced with Omeka a little lateral thinking might reveal a method, but alas.

Thx.

It sounds like you are asking for something like Wordpress Multi-User, which is not currently available for Omeka installations.

If you are designing one website for all of these institutions, each museum could take an Omeka "collection" for designating its objects. And then build exhibits and tag them with their museum's name. All of the collections would be together in the website's archive.

If each museum wants to use their own logo and create their own online identity through this site, I recommend they each have their own installation.

I'd like to revive this topic since I have the same question and Omeka has added a good deal more functionality in the last 5 years.

Would Sheila's suggestion still represent 'best practice' today? I imagine it would, but I haven't looked at Omeka in a while and so I could easily be missing something.

thank you.

For the immediate future, that's probably still true.

However, a new product, Omeka S, is under development for exactly this use case. It's in alpha now, and you can watch development and take an early look from Omeka S on GitHub.

Hello all,
We had been developing exactly that, one Omeka for multiple museums (120) each one with multiple collections and multiple types of elements.

What worked for us:
- one collection named "Museums" where the items have a code (obtained from institutional organization chart) in the DC field 'Identifier'.

- multiple collections, corresponding the different collections of each museum, Those collection have their museum's code in the DC field 'Relation'.

-four big collections: "Exhibits", "Events", "Publications" and "Spaces". Those collections contain the elements of the proper Item type, for all museums, each one with their museum code in the DC 'Relation'.

This way we can have a Home that displays pictures of all the museums in a slider, linked to the home of that museum. also, four small sliders that show, randomized, all Exhibits, Events, Publications and Spaces, each one with it's title and a link to their museum.

We wrote a "SuperFilterPlugin" that recibe all links and filters the requests by Item type and by the appropriate DC field (for the appropriate museum), builds an URL to a Simple Page named "Superpage", appending the code of the museum and it's Id from the 'Items' table, to the URL,

Then, "Superpage" receives the URL with the variables via GET, and with the help of a custom 'browse.php', displays the appropriate items.

Hope that helps, I can share more info about this work if it is helpful for someone.

"Superpage" receiving the URL with the variables via GET, acts as the home for each individual museum. It displays links for the collections and exhibits and those links go to the custom 'browse.php', displays the appropriate items.

This sounds very interesting. How did you handle branding on the site? That's a big concern for us as each contributing/collaborating partner needs to maintain their own identity. Along these lines, what did you call the site? Did you have a general name that could span all the collections?