02469nas a2200121   4500008004100000022001400041245008000055210006900135260004200204520204400246100002102290856003602311       2008                        eng d  a1913-610200aOmeka: Open Source Web Publishing for Research, Collections and Exhibitions0 aOmeka Open Source Web Publishing for Research Collections and Ex  aOttawabTalent First Networkc12/20083 aWell into the second decade of the web, many collecting institutions and aspiring digital humanists still find it difficult to mount online exhibitions and publish collections-based research because they lack either technical skills or sufficient funding to pay high priced web design vendors. The digital libraries and archives fields have produced high quality repository and collections management software, but these packages carry too much technical overhead and pay too little attention to web presentation and end user interface for most digital humanities projects. Commercial blog packages have made it easy for digital humanists to publish materials to the web, but the blog's structure of serial text posts does not allow them to present deep collections or complex narratives.

That is why the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, in partnership with the Minnesota Historical Society, has created Omeka. From the Swahili word meaning "to display" or "to lay out for discussion," Omeka is a next generation web publishing platform for academic work of all kinds, one that bridges the university, library, and museum worlds through--and by helping to advance--a set of commonly recognized web and metadata standards. Omeka is free and open source. It offers low installation and maintenance costs--appealing to individual scholars and smaller cultural heritage projects and institutions that lack technical staffs and large budgets. It is standards based, extensible, and interoperable--insuring compliance with accessibility guidelines and integration with existing digital collections systems to help digital humanists of all stripes design online exhibitions more efficiently. Omeka brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to digital humanities websites, fostering the kind of user interaction and participation that are central to the mission of digital humanities, and providing the contribution mechanisms, tagging facilities, and social networking tools that audiences are coming to expect. 
1 aScheinfeldt, Tom  uhttp://timreview.ca/article/211