News Newsletter: January 2025

Message from the Director

Happy 2025, Omekans!

We are looking forward to a very productive year in the coming months. In December, the team met for a day-long session of priority setting that will guide our work in this new year. As a result, we’ve published a set of development priorities for both Omeka Classic and Omeka S.

Omeka Classic is the heart of so much essential digital cultural heritage work and it remains central to much of our thinking as a team, especially because we provide it as a service via Omeka.net. During the coming year, we will continue to focus on accessibility and usability improvements. Also, we are eager to integrate into the Exhibit Builder many of the authoring and design flexibility elements that we debuted for Omeka S during 2024. Similarly, we will focus on expanding the features available via the Geolocation plugin to allow for custom basemaps, as well as polygons and lines.

Omeka S is also going to have an exciting year. We are focused on adding modules to better serve the needs of archivists and museum staff. This means connecting Omeka S to more systems, and building out modules that offer select collections management features directly within the software. Also, we will be paying special attention to global language and authoring issues, as we work to serve Omeka S’s truly global community of users.

For both platforms, the team is also taking up the charge of smoothing sustainability and preservation paths. Omeka installations are complex and there is likely not to be a single push-button solution that serves everyone’s preservation needs. However, we are developing a range of elements (plugins/modules, scripts, and documentation) that will help installation administrators to retire site gracefully and to produce appropriate artefacts that can be deposited in an institutional repository for long-term preservation.

Finally, our quest to create and maintain thorough, helpful documentation continues. We pride ourselves on the end-user documentation for the core software and all of their addons. In 2025, we are focused on improving the designer and developer documentation for the platforms so that individuals and projects extending Omeka in new and exciting ways have the support that they need. We deeply value that work, and, as always, if you’re one of those designers or developers, we would love for you to share your work with us and with the larger Omeka community.

With my best wishes for a happy and successful new year, Sharon


New Developments

Recently, Omeka UI/UX developer Nelson Amaya created the Lively theme for Omeka Classic and Omeka S. This theme offers a variety of customization options and a clean design, and is based on modular styling and mobile first approach with a modern and accessible UX/UI. The sleek design allows for a variety of different colors and images to be incorporated into your site, and has built in options for seamless linking to your organization’s or archive’s social media presence in the webpage’s footer.

Screenshot of the Omeka S version of the new theme Lively.

Also, the Omeka Dev Team has released a Hierarchy module for Omeka S that should be of interest to users who are working with archival collections. Inherently Omeka S has a flat data model. Items may be associated with many Item Sets, but Item Sets cannot contain other Item Sets. Now with the Hierarchy module, users can indicate relationships among Item Sets in a nested fashion. Thus, a user might create logical groupings of items that reflect their physical organization in an archive (record group/collection, series, box, folder, etc.). Of course, users may create as many hierarchies and in as many organizational structures as they like. Then, once the hierarchies are created, a user may add them to item or item set pages by adding a resource page block, or by adding them to individual site pages with a page block.

Screenshot of the Hierarchy module in action.

The release of the Hierarchy module is the first in a number of steps that the Omeka Team is taking to support users who work with archival collections. For those who wish to describe archival materials, we recommend considering Records in Context as a linked data vocabulary. Then, that model may be deployed to create a Resource Template to describe collections, agents, and archival materials. Furthermore, the Omeka Dev Team has a number of additional modules planned. Matthew McKinley is already working on a connector module for Archivematica , so that users of that system can import their materials into Omeka S. We are also eager to develop a connector for ArchivesSpace. If there are users who have active ASpace instances and are willing to join us in developing requirements for the module, we would like to hear from you.

Spotlight: Houston Community College Fashion Archive

Screenshot of Houston Community College Fashion Archive site

This quarter’s Omeka newsletter Spotlight is the Houston Community College Fashion Archive, a free resource for fashion design and research featuring historical garments and accessories from the 1740s to the 2000s with a Texas emphasis. This Omeka.net site makes use of the Big Picture theme and showcases a variety of collections containing a total of more than 800 items including performance costumes, shoes, hats, textiles, and historical fashion. They also have collections featuring Tradition Costumes, which contains the ethnic and international garments donated by Kay King when she established the archive, and Alumni created designs. The HCC Fashion Archive is a fragment of the total collection maintained by the Houston Community College Fashion Department and is digitally created and maintained by Houston Community College Libraries. It is funded in part by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services through a grant to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission and the Keating Foundation. 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

Head shot of woman with dark hair in dress shirt

Name: Kim Nguyen

Role: Lead UI/UX Designer

How long have you been with Omeka?

Since 2011

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

I designed the admin interfaces for Omeka Classic 2 and Omeka S, several themes for both, as well as the sites for Omeka.org and Omeka.net. I’ve also designed and developed project themes for Papers of the War Department 1784-1800, Hearing the Americas, and Histories of the National Mall.

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

I love the sheer variety of projects I get to work on. I appreciate being able to work on both the Omeka platforms as well as projects that use them, giving me better insight as to how to improve our tools for our users. Lately, I’ve been especially enjoying how much I’ve been learning while digging into web accessibility improvements.

What’s a fun fact about you?

I got into building colorful mechanical keyboards as a pandemic hobby.

Spring Intensive Courses Enrollment

Our next round of eight-week Omeka Classic and Omeka S courses will begin February 11 and February 12, respectively. To enroll in an online course click on the link below. 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!

Preview

Keep an eye out for our upcoming editions of this newsletter, which will include…

  • OHMS implementation, including hosted media, for Omeka.net
  • Developments regarding the Site Flattener that will allow for static site export and/or unstyled HTML
  • Information on our intensive courses offerings for 2025
  • …and much more!
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