As you may have heard, UO Libraries recently decided to use Omeka S for faculty-initiated digital exhibitions. Omeka S is an open-source digital exhibition platform created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Like its older sibling Omeka Classic, Omeka S makes it easy to assemble digital collections and organize them into digital exhibitions. Omeka S also has the power to incorporate linked open data (the “S” is for “semantic,” I’ve been told), so it’s even more powerful than Classic when it comes to discoverability and metadata processing. I’m excited to be learning Omeka S along with some of the Mellon Faculty Fellows this year as we work on their digital exhibitions.
Unfortunately, there’s a downside to choosing Omeka S over Classic: because Omeka S is still pretty new, there aren’t very many themes available. In Omeka-land, a theme is the visual styling of a digital exhibition, and Omeka S comes with only four to choose from. While the options are all elegant and classic, they aren’t very exciting. Without the resources to develop the code for a custom theme ourselves, we would have to settle for a theme that just wasn’t a great fit for the Mellon exhibitions.
With some encouragement from my colleagues in Digital Scholarship Services, I set off on an internet search for digital exhibitions created with Omeka S and custom-made themes. One in particular caught my eye: Miss Pink’s Wildflowers, a digital exhibition created by the University of Tasmania Library. I especially liked that the theme allowed for a big background image, and I thought the side navigation panel would come in handy. I sent an e-mail asking who developed the theme, and whether they would be willing to let us use it, too.
A day or two later came the response from a very helpful librarian at the University of Tasmania: they were happy to share! She sent me the code, and that was that. We are planning to use the theme in some exhibitions this year, and I’ll be proud to acknowledge our Tasmanian friends in the credits.