Omeka is a content management system (CMS) that allows you to quickly create and manage archives and digital exhibits either individually or as part of a class or research group. Omeka websites can be created without any web design or coding experience, take very little time to install, and offer a user-friendly interface.
36 views of Mt. Fuji is a digital gallery built with Omeka, together with the plugins Omeka Exhibit Builder and Neatline, to give NYU Gallatin faculty and students a sense of what is possible with these tools.
Without any plugins, Omeka can be used to create extensive databases and complex digital archives catalogued according to Dublin Core metadata, a set of terms which can be used to describe both web and physical resources. Once Omeka is installed, users can add items to the archive simply by filling in online forms and, if necessary, uploading files to accompany them. Omeka can include different types of items without any changes to the application, including still images, texts, and audio recordings.
Visitors to the site can browse and view items according to collections and tags, which provide some curatorial power to the creators of the site. Additional plugins give creators more options for displaying items on the site (such as creating an exhibit page; see below).
Our demo site includes an Omeka database with about 50 items. You can view a list of all our items as well as a curated collection of items.
Exhibit Builder Plugin
The Exhibit Builder greatly expands opportunities for creativity and interaction with the items in an Omeka collection. The Exhibit Builder can be used to highlight certain items or sets of items, create narratives around selected items, and to include outside sources and context for the items. Users can add interpretive and explanatory text to selected items from the archive.
An example from the sample Omeka site is the exhibit “Evolving Edo.” The exhibit focuses on a series of images of the same location in Tokyo. While the exhibit is not extensive, it does highlight some of the features of the Exhibit Builder plugin, such as the ability to embed outside media (with some tweaking of the settings) and create multiple pages within a single exhibit.
Neatline Plugin
Neatline combines the archival powers of Omeka with a mapping tool for creating map or image-based exhibits. While the use of historical maps is possible through mapping applications such as Map Warper and ArcGIS, the built-in mapping tools are sufficient for many projects. Our sample Neatline exhibit, “36 Views of Mt. Fuji,” was built with a single plugin and the Neatline mapping tools.
Neatline itself has a variety of plugins to create a user interface and organize the items in the exhibit. The sample exhibit we created includes Waypoints, which allows us to create a list of items for users to click through. Other plugins include timelines to organize items not only geographically on the map, but chronologically as well.
Creation of a simple Neatline exhibit does not necessarily need to be a time-consuming endeavor, provided you have an Omeka archive which already includes the items you wish to include. The Neatline exhibit created by Gallatin’s educational technology team includes some features that take more time to create, such as large versions of the images and custom colors for the drawings. While none of this is technically challenging and can be done within the Neatline editor, making these edits for 36 items added a large amount of time to the creation of the exhibit.
If you haven’t already, check our our sample Omeka site and exhibits. And if you’re interested in building an Omeka gallery of your own, please contact us! (You may also check out our instructions for getting started with Omeka).