Archival collections, impossible to house centrally at many campuses, are about to get easier to use. Starting today, librarians and archivists can upload digital content into online collections with relative ease, allowing them to effectively curate items with open-source tools instead of relying on third-party consultants to build specialized Web portals.

The solution is a software package called Omeka (whose Swahili name means, among other things, “to display,” “to lay out for discussion” or “to unpack”), developed by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media. The center, which supports numerous projects exploring online archives for historical purposes, also developed the open-source citation management tool Zotero. Omeka evolved from several similar historical archive projects being produced independently at the center, such as the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank.

“We sort of started to generalize those technologies that we used in those projects as kind of an internal thing,” said Tom Scheinfeldt, the center’s managing director. But they started to realize the problems faced by curators who couldn’t easily create online exhibitions without going through third-party vendors. “So we wanted to create some kind of system that would allow collecting institutions to mount rich narratives,” he said. A year and a half ago, the developers decided to release the code for a more general audience to meet a “broader need within the museum and library archive community.”

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