Building an Omeka website on AWS

Published: Aug 6, 2023 by Steve Baskauf

I recently finished building an Omeka digital collection for images from the files of Bassett Associates, a landscape architectural firm that operated for over 60 years in Lima, Ohio. This award-winning firm, which disbanded in 2017, was well known for its zoological design work and also did ground-breaking work in incorporating storm water retention as part of landscape site design.

During the process of building the site, I figured out how to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to implement all of the features of a production Omeka Classic instance. I describe what I learned in a blog post and have also published detailed instructions that should allow someone with patience and moderate command line skills to replicate what I’ve done.

Operating Omeka on AWS is quite affordable. Including the EC2 cloud server, S3 file storage, and a custom domain name, the total cost to operate the site is about US$10 per month.

To view the completed site, visit https://bassettassociates.org/archive/.

Image at top of page: James H. Bassett, “African Plains,” Bassett Associates Archive, accessed August 6, 2023, https://bassettassociates.org/archive/items/show/415. Available under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Image at side: James H. Bassett, “Okapi,” Bassett Associates Archive, accessed August 6, 2023, https://bassettassociates.org/archive/items/show/337. Available under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Enabling ecological survey data integration

Our paper describing the Humboldt Extension to Darwin Core has been published in Ecography. The Humboldt Extension adds 55 terms that enrich the Darwin Core, providing the terms needed to capture and share multiple types of biodiversity survey data. The paper illustrates the benefits of implementing the Humboldt Extension with three case studies and demonstrates how richer data can be used in research, modelling, and to inform decision-making.

Biological survey and monitoring data publishing guide

My coauthors and I have published a guide to help people understand how to use the new Humboldt Extension for Biological Inventories of the Darwin Core standard. The guide includes diagrams and detailed information about how to structure the data to capture the hierarchical structure typically found in monitoring projects.

Open Science recipes published

My colleage from the Vanderbilt Libraries’ Digital Lab, Shenmeng Xu, an I have published two chapters in the ACRL’s 2025 Open Science Cookbook. The Cookbook is a lighthearted take on technical topics where instructions are given in “recipe” format to teach beginners new tech skills.