Message from the Director
Greetings, Omekans!
It’s the dog days of summer here in Northern Virginia, and just like many of you the Omeka Team is hard at work during its busiest season. We’re moving forward with developments for archivists and oral historians that we will release in the Fall and Winter.
For so many, summer is a time for grant proposal development and planning. The Omeka Team has decades of combined experience designing and sustaining digital cultural heritage projects, so we know how important it is to plan for the future right from the beginning. To try to assist our users with that planning, we’ve launched our Sustainability Hosting Plans. More than a proforma data management plan, a Sustainability Hosting Plan can offer a project team and their funders the guarantee that their digital cultural heritage work will be available to their communities for years to come, and that they’ll have objects to preserve when it is time to sunset the project. Don’t let your hard work disappear at the end of the funding period!
Take care, and good luck with your grant proposals!
Sharon M. Leon
New Developments
This quarter has featured many exciting developments in the world of Omeka! The Mapping module (v.2.0) includes a number of new features in this release that should be especially interesting to former users of Neatline. This release adds support for creating polygon and linestring geometries, which allows a user to associate items with a general area or to pin it to a line, such as a street.
The update includes other key features including the ability to control the number of items per page on a map browse, adds pagination to the map browse page, adds a map to the public item set show pages via a resource page block and also the admin item set show page, and makes the modification of the feature pop-up markup easier. We have removed the Stamen basemaps because they have been discontinued.
We also announced the launch of our new Sustainability Hosting packages. These packages were developed for users who have completed active work on their Omeka digital publishing project and want to ensure that their work is available to public users in an ongoing way, even though the project is not under ongoing development. Each Sustainability Hosting package includes a set of offerings that are designed to allow public visitors ongoing functional access to a completed project without burdening the project creators with the duties of infrastructure update and maintenance.
While clients may contract for a term of any number of years, selecting a five year or longer term results in a 25% discount on the hosting fees. If you are interested in more information about Sustainability Hosting, please contact the Omeka Services Team.
Spotlight: Jane Addams Digital Edition
This quarter’s Omeka newsletter Spotlight is the Jane Addams Digital Edition, a project dedicated to publishing Jane Addams’ correspondence and writings for the period 1901-1935. This Omeka Classic site showcases more than 34,000 items, 1,400 collections, and 16 exhibits that comprise not just documents, but also the people, organizations, and events related to the texts. It also makes use of a number of popular Omeka plugins, including Collection Tree and Geolocation. This ongoing project looks to locate and incorporate additional materials, to finish the Selected Papers of Jane Addams, and provide hands-on DH experience for undergraduates. The project is currently located within Ramapo College of New Jersey’s School of Humanities and Global Studies (SHGS) following Dr. Cathy Moran Hajo’s 2015 re-launch of the Jane Addams Papers Project. Explore the collections and learn more about the project today.
Share your work with us for inclusion in our directories, and for a possible future Spotlight!
Omeka in the World
We are looking forward to seeing you at DH 2024 in Arlington from August 6 - 9. Be sure to check out the Digital Scholar swag in your registration bags, which includes some information about Omeka courses and hosting plans. Feel free to come chat with us during sessions and breaks. You can identify us by our Omeka lanyards!
Preview
Keep an eye out for our upcoming editions of this newsletter, which will include…
- Updates on Omeka’s integration with Zotero, Tropy, and Sourcery
- New rules regarding sales tax for Omeka.net
- Information for enrolling in our Fall intensive courses
- … and much more!