The last month in the United States has been extremely troubling for memory workers, scholars, students, and members of the public who work with and care about cultural heritage.
The hearts of the whole Omeka Team go out to every individual and organization who has had a federal grant cancelled, and to the many, many dedicated public servants at the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Park Service who have had their jobs eliminated.
In this time of upheaval, we want to provide some context about how the Omeka Team operates and also the safety of your work with our software.
- Omeka and all of its associated offerings are fully independent of grant funding and are not affiliated with any university. Omeka is sustained through the proceeds derived from Omeka.net subscriptions and from the fees associated with the services we offer. The project is a subsidiary of Digital Scholar, a company founded in 2009 to support and sustain key open source scholarly communications and cultural heritage projects, including Zotero, Tropy, Sourcery, and PressForward. As such, Omeka Classic, Omeka S, and their associated add-ons will always remain open source, and free for you to use.
- As an independent project, work and services provided by the Omeka Team are not impeded by any current executive orders. If you have a project that you have developed on Omeka.net with your subscription or if you host Omeka’s open source software with us or an independent internet service provider, your work is yours, and it is safe from intrusion. Of course, if funding or hosting for your Omeka project is provided by an institution, the administration’s policies could affect that institution and thereby your project.
Our primary goal at Omeka is to help you build the sites you want to build with your digital cultural heritage. That might mean digitizing and describing a collection of 19th century letters. Or, it might mean launching a digital collecting project that documents a local community’s struggle with deindustrialization. It might even mean telling the stories of federal workers who have lost their jobs. No matter how you use Omeka, we are here to support you.