Omeka

Omeka is a free, open-source web publishing platform for libraries, museums, archives, scholars, and educators to share digital collections and create media-rich online exhibits.

🚀 Overview

Omeka simplifies the creation and publication of online digital exhibits and collections, allowing users to upload items, add metadata, and organize them into searchable, visually appealing sites without needing deep coding knowledge.

It solves the problem of making cultural heritage materials accessible online for institutions and individuals who lack resources for custom development. Originally built for small museums and historical societies by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, it has evolved into a robust tool powering thousands of sites worldwide, with both single-site (Classic) and multi-site networked (S) versions.

The project was created to democratize digital publishing in the humanities, providing standards-compliant metadata support, extensibility, and ease-of-use akin to blogging platforms but tailored for collections.

✨ Key Features

Upload and manage digital items (images, documents, audio/video) with rich, standards-based metadata like Dublin Core
Organize items into collections and create public-facing exhibits or multi-site networks (Omeka S)
Extensible via hundreds of community-built plugins/modules for mapping, OAI-PMH, comments, social sharing, etc.
Customizable themes, Linked Open Data/JSON-LD support (Omeka S), and internationalization in dozens of languages
Optional: Omeka Everywhere for mobile/offline extensions, ongoing AI/text analysis plugins

🛠 Tech Stack

Frontend: HTML/CSS/JavaScript, jQuery, custom themes
Backend: PHP 8.1+ (Laminas framework for Omeka S), Composer
Database: MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.2+
Auth: Built-in multi-user system with roles and permissions / Custom
Hosting: Self-hosted (Apache/Nginx, ImageMagick), Omeka.net SaaS, Omeka Services

👥 Who Is This For?

This project is useful for:

Librarians, archivists, and museum curators who want to publish digital collections online
Educators and students in digital humanities courses building exhibits
Institutions like universities and galleries looking for networked multi-site management

📸 Screenshots / Demo

Live demo: https://omeka.org/s/showcase, https://omeka.org/classic/showcase, https://info.omeka.net/showcase
GitHub: https://github.com/omeka/omeka-s (Omeka S), https://github.com/omeka/Omeka (Classic)

🔥 Project Status

🟢 Actively building

Last updated: 2026-03-24

❓ FAQ

Is this project free?

Yes / Open Source (Free downloads for self-hosting; freemium hosted options via Omeka.net with paid upgrades.)

Is the source code available?

Yes — https://github.com/omeka/omeka-s, https://github.com/omeka/Omeka

Can I contribute?

Yes — file issues/PRs on GitHub repositories, develop and share modules/plugins, contribute translations via Transifex, join discussions on https://forum.omeka.org, attend community calls.