Create Online Exhibitions with Omeka

Thanks to many wonderful digitisation projects, we now have a wealth of archival images available to us. This provides a great opportunity to make those artefacts go further by curating them. Omeka is an open-source web publishing platform for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibitions. Used by many small museums and historical societies, Omeka is also available to individuals at low or no cost. The platform was originally developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, which was also responsible for indispensable tools like Zotero.

Although there are WordPress plugins that offer similar functionality, Omeka gives you a lot more control over how you present your media, with beautiful themes and slideshows built in. And it uses Dublin Core metadata standards, which means resources can be more easily shared and discovered across different systems and organisations.

You can see a range of examples in the Omeka showcase, including Goin’ North, which shares stories form the first great migration to Philadelphia.

An Omeka exhibition can include images, videos, maps, and much more. Cleveland Historical is an excellent example of the mapping feature.

You can download and install Omeka yourself for free. If that’s not your idea of fun, you can get a hosting plan with Omeka.net. There’s a free plan, which offers a single site with limited themes and plugins. Or for more functionality, you pay $35 per year. There are also bigger packages if you require multiple sites or more storage.

There’s excellent documentation, explaining both set up and usage.

If you want to host Omeka alongside other publishing platforms, such as WordPress or Scalar, it might make sense to buy a hosting package through Reclaim Hosting. Aimed at academics and non-profits, their shared hosting starts at just $36pa. You can scale it up at any time to suit your requirements. Reclaim offers one-click installation for Omeka, too.¹

Omeka is ideal for sharing your visual research, or for demonstrating your curatorial skills when applying for jobs or funding.

I discuss Omeka and similar platforms in my workshops Promoting Your Academic Research Online and How to Publish Your PhD.