Omeka Launches a Hosted Platform to Move Museum Collections to the Cloud

Open-source publishing platform Omeka announces today the launch of a hosted Web service, Omeka.net. While similar in some ways to the content management system provided by WordPress, Omeka is geared towards the online exhibition of library, museum and archive collections.

And much like WordPress and other services have simplified the publication of texts online, Omeka is aimed at helping bring academic scholarship and cultural heritage sites to the Internet. By using Omeka.net, scholars and archivists will be able to easily build digital exhibits and publish digital scholarship, while also taking advantage of Web 2.0 tools that foster collaboration and communication.

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Omeka handles a variety of content – images, audio, video, text – all of which can be marked with the standards-based Dublin Core metadata.

The new hosted service offers five different plans for users (including a free option), with different features and pricing based on the number of sites, plugins, and storage, so that both individual and institutional users will be able to utilize Omeka.

Omeka.net is part of the Omeka project and has a strong open source development and user community that supports it. Developed in part by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Omeka is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Samuel H. Kress Foundation.