Part of your participation in the Jackman Humanities Institute Scholars in Residence Program gives you the opportunity to contribute to building a Digital Exhibit using Omeka. You will gain hands-on experience adding pages and digital items to the exhibit, and will be able to describe your items and their context in detail. Before we begin, here is some information about Omeka.
Often known as the Wordpress of the Museum World, Omeka is a free, open source content management system for online digital collections. It allows its users to exhibit Cultural Heritage objects, and has numerous templates, themes and common plugins that can be used. It has a focus on content delivery or display rather than focusing on preservation, and its metadata (or cataloging description fields) are based on Dublic Core Standards. Here are some examples of exhibits that use Omekahttps://omeka.org/classic/showcase/.
Omeka has been awarded a technology collaboration award by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and is frequently used to teach curation. One of the many benefits of Omeka is that it is very easy to learn, and also requires very little technical expertise.
The Exhibit Builder plugin allows you to develop online exhibits, or special web pages, that combine items from your Omeka archive and may include narrative text.Exhibits are composed of pages, generally an initial page that introduces your exhibit and subsequent pages composed of the items from your Omeka database that you wish to highlight and/or relate to each other. Exhibit Builder exhibits may be as short as one page or consist of multiple pages. You can make the pages of an exhibit hierarchical.
Please explore the UTL Omeka developed digital collections here.
