Omeka Commons: Preserving and Sharing Our Dispersed Digital Commonwealth

Omeka Commons: Preserving and Sharing Our Dispersed Digital Commonwealth

Omeka Commons: Preserving and Sharing Our Dispersed Digital Commonwealth

Large collecting institutions and their foundation backers have made good progress in recent years digitizing and making collections available online. Private corporations such as Thompson and Google have also done extensive work in this area. As impressive as these large-scale efforts are, materials found in large archives represent just a fraction of the unique archival materials in institutional holdings. Far greater—in numbers and even richness—are the combined collections found in small museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies around the world.
To fund each of these institutions individually to mount their collections online is not feasible. he answer is to provide a low-barrier, low-cost, standards-based means for local institutions and individuals to mount their own online collections and a similarly low-barrier means for them to voluntarily share those materials for central preservation and discovery. In partnership with the Internet Archive, the Center for History and New Media aims to meet this remaining challenge by networking the thousands of local websites using Omeka and aggregating their contents into a single, permanent, open access repository: Omeka Commons.

12/01/2009

11/30/2012

Tom Scheinfeldt

Sharon Leon

Dan Cohen

Sheila Brennan

Jeremy Boggs

Jeremy Boggs

Kim Nguyen

Patrick Murray-John

Jim Safley

Raymond Yee

Sheila Brennan

Kris Kelly

Linda Frueh

1) Omeka Commons will provide long-term digital preservation for cultural heritage institutions, raise visibility, and maintain local control over digital assets.

2) Omeka Commons will improve discovery for researchers, increase access to cultural heritage collections, and encourage collaboration.

Institute of Museum and Library Services

$984,000

Internet Archive