Academic museum project open for downloading: Omeka
Omeka, an open source museum content tool developed by George Mason University's Center for History and New Media, is now available for downloading. Omeka's intention:
to satisfy the needs of cultural institutions that lack technical staffs and large budgets. Bringing Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to small museum, historical society, and library websites, Omeka fosters the kind of user interaction and participation that is central to the mission of those cultural institutions.
InsideHigherEd expands on Omeka's Web 2.0 nature:
Using blogging software as a kind of model, the software’s developers envision Omeka as a relatively simple way to produce a rich, well-designed site that meets the common needs of librarians and archivists. The software is highly customizable and open-source, and the site has a database of plug-ins written by other users and contributors that can, for example, alter a collection’s look, features and layout.
Omeka's previous beta phase resulted in a series of collections, which can be examined through the project's showcase.
Pedagogical uses are being explored.
Comments:
On the subject of pedagogical uses of Omeka, I'm teaching an undergraduate seminar in digital history this semester at the University of Mary Washington. [Details are are http://digitalhistory.umwblogs.org and my own blog at http://mcclurken.blogspot.com.] The students in the seminar were shown an array of digital tools during the first 4 weeks of the semester. Of those, they chose a series of tools for their projects, and three of the four student groups in the course decided to use Omeka to create archives for their projects. [These projects, descriptions of which can be seen at the course blog noted above, include a site on civil rights leader James Farmer, a project using alumni interviews to tell the history of UMW, and a site exploring James Monroe's time as Minister to France.]
I should note that although I (via UMW's excellent Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies experts) presented Omeka to the students as one of many options, they all seemed to quickly get its possible uses as an archive and presentation tool.
We began with a test Omeka installation for the entire class with which all the students played around. Now, each group will have its own Omeka installation starting this week. They'll begin to populate it with photographs, scanned documents, and videos.
I'd be interested in hearing about how others are using Omeka in their own classes.
Comment by Jeff McClurken [Visitor] 
· http://digitalhistory.umwblogs.org 02/27/08 @ 15:38
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Professor McClurken expans on these comments on this post:
http://mcclurken.blogspot.com/2008/02/omeka-and-digital-history-class.html
Comment by Bryan Alexander [Member] 02/29/08 @ 10:29
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