OER and Publishing Platforms: Omeka

Developed at George Mason, Omeka is a publishing platform geared toward online exhibit creation and academic, non-technical users, though it still offers a range of features.

Ideal Use: Building resources that revolve around a series of different "items" or pieces of content/media that need to be presented in a clean, searchable format. General text pages are also an option.

Pros:

• Diverse feature set and use cases.
• Variety of plugins and pre-built templates.
• Detailed admin panel for collecting and organizing data/items.
• Versatile presentation of photos and multimedia.
• Detailed documentation.

Cons:

• Requires either self-hosted installation or a paid setup on Omeka's servers.
• Paid-setup version limits availability of some plugins, design customization, and other features.
• Admin panel geared toward exhibit and collection functionality may be obtrusive or overkill for smaller-scale publishing and items without much metadata to incorporate.

Here is one of many walkthrough videos available from Omeka, though many are devoted to an earlier version of the platform. This recent video shows some of the detailed navigation and exhibit-oriented options of the software: