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.