George Mason University

Building on the success of its open source Omeka Web publishing software, the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University will pilot test a new Omeka Commons. This centralized repository service will be designed to meet the needs of smaller cultural heritage and scholarship organizations that often have difficulty creating, delivering, and sustaining online digital collections. In this two-year pilot, the Commons will offer hosting and content backup services for a small test group of organizations, as well as a framework for online users to discover, use, and link to hosted digital collections and objects. CHNM will work with legal and technical advisors to evaluate metadata and licensing schema for the repository, and will produce a white paper with recommendations to guide future work.