Omeka 101
Omeka is a Swahili word that means “to display or lay our wares.”
It was created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media in 2006
Omeka was created specifically to help archivists, museum and library professionals, and academics to build websites and online exhibits without having to hire a programmer to develop their individual site. It’s what we call “out of the box” because you don’t need to know how to write code to set this up.
In a nutshell, Omeka is a simple, free web publishing system built by and for scholars and used by hundreds of libraries, archives, historical societies, museums, and teachers to create online databases and scholarly interpretations of digital collections.
There are two versions of Omeka.
Omeka.net: hosted by Roy Rosenzweig Center at George Mason University
Omeka.org: “self” hosted, meaning hosted through an independent web hosting service.
Both are free. With Omeka.net you can pay extra for extra features. With Omeka.org all the features are free but you need someone to update and manage it (a webhosting service).
There are many great web hosting services. We've had GREAT experience working with Reclaim Hosting:
https://reclaimhosting.com/