My library has used Omeka as part of our suite of platforms for creating digital collections and exhibits for many years now. It’s easy to administer and use, and many of our students, particularly in history or digital humanities, learn how to create exhibits with it in class or have experience with it from other institutions, which makes it a good solution for student projects. This creates challenges, however, since it’s been difficult to have multiple sites or distributed administration. A common scenario is that we have a volunteer student, often in history, working on a digital exhibit as part of a practicum, and we want the donor to review the exhibit before it goes live. We had to create administrative accounts for both the student and the donor, which required a lot of explanations about how to get in to just the one part of the system they were supposed to be in (it’s possible to create a special account to view collections that aren’t public, but not exhibits). Even though the admin accounts can’t do everything (there’s a super admin level for that), it’s a bit alarming to hand out administrative accounts to people I barely know.
This problem goes away with Omeka S, which is the new and completely rebuilt Omeka. It supports having multiple sites (which is the new name for exhibits) and distributed administration by site. Along with this, there are sophisticated metadata templates that you can assign to sites or users, which takes away the need for lots of documentation on what metadata to use for which item type. When I showed a member of my library’s technical services department the metadata templates in Omeka S, she gasped with excitement. This should indicate that, at least for those of us working on the back end, this is a fun system to use.
Trying it Out For Yourself
I have included some screenshots below, but you might want to use the Omeka S Sandbox to follow along. You can experiment with anything, and the data is reset every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. This includes a variety of sample exhibits, one is “A Battered Tin Dispatch Box” from which I include some screenshots below.
A Quick Tour Through Omeka S
This is what the Omeka Classic administrative dashboard looks like for a super administrator.
And this is the dashboard for Omeka S. It’s not all that different functionally, but definitely a different aesthetic experience.
Most things in Omeka S work analogously to classic Omeka, but some things have been renamed or moved around. The documentation walks through everything in order, so it’s a great place to start learning. Overall, my feeling about Omeka S is that it’s much easier to tap into the powerful features with less of a learning curve. I first learned Omeka S at the DLF Forum conference in fall 2017 directly from Patrick Murray-John, the Omeka Development Team Manager, and some of what is below is from his description.
Sites
Omeka S has the very useful concept of Sites, which again function like exhibits in classic Omeka. Each site has its own set of administrative functions and user permissions, which allow for viewer, editor, or admin by site. I really appreciate this, since it allowed me to give student volunteers access to just the site they needed, and when we need to give other people access to view the site before it’s published we can do that. It’s easier to add outside or supplementary materials to the exhibit navigation. On the individual pages there are a variety of blocks available, and the layout is easier for people without a lot of HTML skills to set up.
Resource Templates
These existed in Omeka Classic, but were less straightforward. Now you can set a resource template with properties from multiple vocabularies and build the documentation right into the template. The data type can be text or URI, or draw from vocabularies with autosuggest. For example, you can set the Rights field to draw from Rights Statement options.
Items
Items work in a similar fashion to Omeka Classic. Items exist at the installation level, so can be reused across multiple sites. What’s great is that the nature of an item can be much more flexible. They can include URIs, maps, and multiple types of media such as a URL, HTML, IIIF image, oEmbed, or YouTube. This reflects the actual way that we were using Omeka Classic, but without the technical overhead to make it all work. This will make it easier for more people to create much more interactive and web-integrated exhibits.
Item Sets
Item Sets are the new name given to Collections and, like Items, they can have metadata from multiple vocabularies. Item Sets are analogous to Collections, but items can be in multiple Item Sets to be associated with sites to limit what people see. The tools for batch adding and editing are similar, but more powerful because you can actually remove or edit metadata in bulk.
Themes
Themes in Omeka S have changed quite a bit, and as Murray-John explained, it is more complicated to do theming than in the past. Rather than call to local functions, Omeka S uses patterns from Zend Framework 3, and so the process of theming will require more careful thought and planning. That said, the base themes provided are a great base, and thanks to the multiple options for layouts in sites, it’s less critical to be able to create custom themes for certain exhibits. I wrote about how to create themes in Omeka in 2013, and while some of that still holds true, you would want to consult the updated documentation to see how to do this in Omeka S.
Mapping
One of my favorite things in Omeka S is the Mapping module, which allows you to add geolocation metadata to items, and create a map on site pages. Here’s an example from the Omeka S Sandbox with locations related to Scotland Yard mapped for an item in the Battered Tin Dispatch Box exhibit.
This can then turn into an interactive map on the front end.
For the vast majority of mapping projects that our students want to do, this works in a very straightforward manner. Neatline is a plugin for Omeka Classic that allows much more sophisticated mapping and timelines–while it should be ported over to Omeka S, it currently is not listed as a module. In my experience, however, Neatline is more powerful than what many people are trying to do, and that added complexity can be a challenge. So I think the Mapping module looks like a great compromise.
Possible Approaches to Migration
Migration between Omeka Classic and Omeka S works well for items. For that, there’s the Omeka2 Importer module. Because exhibits work differently, they would have to be recreated. Omeka.net, the hosted version of Omeka, will stay on Omeka Classic for the foreseeable future, so there’s no concern that it will stop being supported any time soon, according to Patrick Murray-John.
Conclusion
We are still working on setting up Omeka S. My personal approach is that as new ideas for exhibits come up we will start them first in Omeka S. As we have time and interest, we may start to migrate older exhibits if they need continual management. Because some of our older exhibits rely on Omeka Classic pla but are planning to mostly create new exhibits in there that don’t rely on Omeka Classic plugins. I am excited to pair this with our other digital collection platforms to build exhibits that use content across our platforms and extend into the wider web.