Resum

Omeka S as an alternative for the development of digital collections and digital humanity projects

Objectives: a detailed description of the main features and functionalities of Omeka S, a free software content management system aimed at creating repositories and digital libraries, as well as being widely used in various kinds of digital humanities projects, is presented.

Methodology: the analysis of the characteristics of Omeka S has been carried out from a literature review, the information available on the website and the official documentation of the application, as well as through its installation, use, and analysis. The description of the application is complemented by a compilation of various international use cases in the field of digital humanities that showcase the versatility of the tool. Finally, a comparison is offered with five other free software applications available on the market: Omeka Classic, CollectiveAccess, Mukurtu, ResearchSpace and Arches.

Results: among the main strengths of Omeka S is its ease of installation, maintenance, and use, its multisite architecture, the ease of integrating vocabularies from the semantic web as ontologies, its flexibility to create description templates for digital objects, the freedom in the design of the pages that make up the public interface, or its native integration with other repository management systems such as DSpace or Fedora Commons, thus being able to be implemented as a platform for the management and publication of resources derived from the repository, or as a public access layer of the digital objects, respectively. On the other hand, managing a project with Omeka S requires a greater initial effort due to its great flexibility. Finally, the system is less competent at accessing the database, which cannot be done natively through SPARQL queries.