Tools To Know About: Omeka

Omeka is a free tool designed for cultural institutions to create websites to share collections and tell narratives. Intended as a place to host digital collections it's structured like a repository with a hierarchical order and Dublin Core metadata, but it lets curators easily arrange objects into narrative collections with text and images.

The Five Colleges have used Omeka to showcase a few digital projects. At Oberlin the History of The Carnegie Library collection tells the story of the library building. While a Wooster student use Omeka to create a Costume Archive as part of a local NGL project. Ohio Wesleyan is also about to launch an Omeka site as the interface for the local NGL project Digital Resources for the Teaching of the History of the Book. Though it takes a bit of setup Omeka can be an easy way to create a graphical interface for your collections. Have you used Omeka or are you thinking about it? Let us know in the comments.