This Friday we will be meeting in the ISRL at 10:00am to do two test installs of new software for managing and presenting museum and cultural heritage collections.

Omeka
Omeka is a collaboration between the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Minnesota Historical Society. Omeka appears to be similar to open source blogging and wiki software - it’s easy to install, extensible with plugins and themes and offers easy dissemination through RSS feeds.

Be sure to check out the Showcase of existing Omeka project as well.

Open Collection
In contrast to Omeka, Open Collection is a “full-featured collections management and online access application for museums, archives and digital collections” intended to provide an alternative to expensive proprietary systems such as The Museum System, Willoughby Systems, or Past Pefect. Like many of these systems, OC also includes a public access module that has been used to provide public access to collections information.

This week our focus will be on the installation, but I hope to revist these once they are up and running to see how they function, ease of use, strengths, weaknesses, etc.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 10:43 am and is filed under Evaluation, History, Open Source, Published. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.