Open-source publishing platform Omeka announces today the launch of a hosted Web service, Omeka.net. While similar in some ways to the content management system provided by WordPress, Omeka is geared towards the online exhibition of library, museum and archive collections, reports ReadWriteWeb. And much like WordPress and other services have simplified the publication of texts online, Omeka is aimed at helping bring academic scholarship and cultural heritage sites to the Internet. By using Omeka.net, scholars and archivists will be able to easily build digital exhibits and publish digital scholarship, while also taking advantage of Web 2.0 tools that foster collaboration and communication. Omeka handles a variety of content – images, audio, video, text – all of which can be marked with the standards-based Dublin Core metadata. The new hosted service offers five different plans for users (including a free option), with different features and pricing based on the number of sites, plugins, and storage, so that both individual and institutional users will be able to utilize Omeka…

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