Digital Sandbox

According to the Omeka project page, “‘Omeka’ is a Swahili word meaning to display or layout wares; to speak out; to spread out; to unpack. The team chose this name, because it signifies the practices that Omeka helps its users to do with digital content and through building digital projects for online communities.”

Omeka is an open-source web publishing platform for creating digital collections through methods used by librarians, museum curators, and other cultural heritage professionals.

There are two different versions of Omeka: Omeka Classic and Omeka S. This section of the guide provides resources for Omeka Classic. For resources on Omeka S, visit the Omeka S section of this guide.

Omeka Classic is the original version of Omeka, developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media in 2007 and released in 2008, with ongoing version updates. It is designed to be an accessible content management system that uses shortcodes and plugins to add various features to a user’s digital collection and share it online with a broad audience. For a full list of the shortcodes and plugins that you can use in Omeka Classic, read through the Omeka Classic documentation.

Drawing on collection development practices in library and information science, Omeka Classic lets a user build a digital collection through uploading items, creating records for them, and compiling those records into a collection with a single title.

An item in this sense usually refers to a book or art piece but can also be a postcard or a tabletop role-playing game, as long as a digital version of it can be created and uploaded.

Records are displayed in Omeka Classic to represent each item and make up the whole digital collection that is shared online.

Collections are created through choosing from a list of records and labeling the whole selection with a shared title.

Records are created through filling out a form about an item, with fields taken from the Dublin Core Metadata Standard.

Here is a table of some of the most used Dublin Core fields with short definitions and relevant examples. First-time Omeka Classic users can refer to this table when creating records.

For more information about Dublin Core, users can refer to the Working with Dublin Core section of the Omeka Classic User Manual.

For general information about metadata and the different standards used for it, Jenn Riley’s Understanding Metadata: What is Metadata, and What is it For?: A Primer, published by the National Information Standards Organization (2017) is a good introduction. Omeka Classic users can customize the fields in their records, so an understanding of other metadata standards in addition to Dublin Core can be helpful for exploring the most suitable options for describing their ítems.

If the formatting of the records in Omeka Classic is not to a user’s liking, they can use the HTML Editor within the record form to edit the text.

For learning HTML, the W3Schools HTML Tutorial is a user-friendly way to start. It has built-in boxes to practice writing the HTML tags that, for example, can change text to bold, italics, or a hyperlink.

For checking installation requirements and other systems-related considerations, visit the Omeka Classic System Requirements.

For setting up account privileges and changing user settings, visit the Omeka Classic Administration and User Access Settings.