Omeka is software used to manage digital exhibits and items on the web. It is a way to share your work with the world. It is a system that allows you to create items, which are pieces of content that represent the objects or materials that you are focusing on in your work. Basic items can have files such as images associated with them, and have contextual information in the form of the metadata.
Items can also be integrated into exhibits. Digital exhibits in Omeka provide avenues for putting up your intellectual interpretation of the items and their relationships to one another. Omeka exhibits allow you to do this without altering the basic items that you have created in any way, so all metadata and item-level data remains unchanged.
Omeka.net provides hosted Omeka sites, with a limited free plan and several levels of paid Omeka site services. It is run by the Corporation for Digital Scholarship through the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University.
Omeka.net can be a nice way to experiment with the Omeka platform. However you should know that sites created with Omeka.net cannot be exported as a whole to other hosting platforms or updated versions of Omeka. The export service provided by Omeka.net does not export exhibits, static content such as "About" pages, or data from Omeka plugins, such as comments or annotations. Files hosted by Omeka.net are removed within 1 week of an Omeka.net site's export, and cannot be downloaded in bulk for backup.
