fyi –
Dear Friends,
I am pleased to share the news that the Omeka S Beta dropped today!
Read more about Omeka S on the Omeka blog, download the software to take it for a spin!
This represents many years of hard work. We listened to our users at medium and large institutions who wished for an easier way to launch, monitor, and upgrade many sites from a single installation, and to better integrate Omeka resources and projects with their own digital repositories. We are also grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services who made this development possible.
Though Omeka S is a completely new software package, it shares the same goals and principles of Omeka Classic that users have come to love: a commitment to cost-effective deployment and design, an intuitive user interface, open access to data and resources, and interoperability through standardized data.
New features in Omeka S allow users to publish Linked Open Data; describe and share DPLA-ready resources; extend core functionality with new modules to collect, map, import, and connect resources; and style with 4 new fully-responsive themes.
We imagine a few different user groups will be drawn to Omeka S’s new functionality:
Colleges and universities that want to encourage their faculty and students to develop online publications that make use of special collections and digitized materials will find Omeka S ideal.
Museums and historical societies that would like to create a digital exhibit to accompany the many physical exhibits and installations at their institutions can turn to Omeka S as way to efficiently administer that digital work and reuse digitized collections.
Individual researchers interested in publishing linked open data will find Omeka S a reliable solution for creating and maintaining research collections, and for publishing new scholarship.
If you are wondering if you can migrate existing Omeka sites into Omeka S, the answer is yes. The Omeka 2 Importer relies on the API available in any Omeka 2.x site to ingest its content into a new Omeka S installation:
The Omeka team continues to develop Omeka Classic alongside Omeka S, and has no plans to abandon the current software.
As always, we seek your feedback and assistance in making it better. Please use the forums to share your responses in the Omeka S category, or drop me a line.
Thank you very much for your support of Omeka at different stages of its development, and of the work we do at RRCHNM.
Cheers,
Sheila
