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Omeka

Omeka

Product overview

Purpose: showcasing scholarly collections
Selling point: with Omeka’s ‘five minute set up,’ launching an online exhibit is as easy as launching a blog
Intended audience: designed with non-IT specialists in mind, the platform allows you to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming

Omeka is an open source web publishing platform for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online archives, libraries, museums and exhibits. With Omeka you can publish and exhibit cultural heritage objects and create complex narratives around your data collections, sharing them with viewers in unique and interesting ways.

Technical detail:

  • Research Computing Services specifically offers Omeka Classic

  • A lightweight solution in comparison to traditional institutional repository software like DSpace and Fedora, Omeka has a focus on display and uses an unqualified Dublin Core metadata standard

Key capabilities:

  • upload any file type (e.g. images, video, multipage documents and PDFs, Powerpoint decks and more)

  • add items individually or by batch, using migration tools (e.g. OAI-PMH Harvester, CSV, EAD, Zotero, Atom, Dropbox and more)

  • create large archives of metadata and files (over 100, 000 items)

  • display and annotate your files in an easy to use web interface

  • input metadata of all sorts (e.g. Library of Congress Subject Heading autocomplete, Dublin Core Extended, Simple Vocab, Tag Bandit, Site Notes and more)

  • assign various Copyright licenses to your collections

  • extend your functionalities with a range of publicly available plugins and themes

Example sites

Some examples of Omeka sites that are hosted by the University:

The Omeka Showcase highlights some high profile Omeka sites hosted elsewhere.

Requesting an Omeka site

When you request a new Omeka site, it will be created under https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/omeka-site-name/.

Any eligible University of Melbourne researcher is able to request a new Omeka site - see our eligibility guide and our Terms of Service for more detail on eligibility conditions and usage conditions.

How to request an Omeka site

  1. Go to the Research Computing Portal (make sure you’re connected to the University VPN if you’re off campus, otherwise you won’t be able to access RCP)

  2. Locate an existing, relevant Activity on your RCP dashboard OR create a new Activity from your RCP dashboard (by pressing the Create New Activity button and submitting the resultant form)

  3. In the Activity, press the Add Resource button

  4. In the resultant pop-out, locate the Omeka resource and press its Add Resource 0/1 button

  5. In the Activity, locate the Omeka resource and press its Request an Allocation button

  6. In the resultant pop-out, leave the quota fields pre-filled but do set an allocation name, and then press Request

Getting help with your Omeka site

Please contact RCS via the below forms to report any issues with the Omeka service: