Omeka is a site-building platform, sort of like WordPress, but its purpose is more to house the digital form of a collection, rather than to build a robust website. I’ve used it once before, but only in limited capacity. In HIST 299, myself and each of my classmates were tasked with archiving a news article or essay and then posting it, with accurate metadata, to hist299.umwhistory.org. For the purposes of this class, my group will most likely not use Omeka. While it could be useful for a project like ours, my group is most likely going to use WordPress, since it has more options for customization. I did take a look through a few Omeka sites, just for ideas of what could be done, they are as follows:

Broadside Ballads

The first site was the Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads Project, a project of the American Antiquarian Society. The site itself is one of the nicer sites I have seen made with Omeka. I like the simplistic style, which lets the broadsides themselves shine when looking at items in the collection, and keeps the site relatively accessible. The home page features not only a Featured Broadside, which changes out each time the page is reloaded, but brief information about the project, as well as what can be found deeper into the website.

Louis Prang

The other site that I looked at was Louis Prang and Chromolithography. Like the the Broadsides project above, this project is also of the American Antiquarian Society. This site definitely felt more outdated than the first. I’m not sure what it was about it though. It may have been the obvious content box size, or the deep colors in contrast to the lighter, more monotone color palettes of most modern sites, regardless, this site felt like I had gone back in time to elementary or early middle school.