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.

Favorite winners of Nebula Award for Best Novel

In March 2025, I finished reading all 60 of the winners of the the Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy novel. Many of my favorites were also winners of the Hugo Award, so I wrote a follow-up blog post to my earlier post about my favorite Hugo winners, focusing on favorites that weren’t already discussed in the Hugo post.

Favorite winners of Hugo Award for Best Novel

In May 2023, I finished reading all 71 of the winners of the the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy novel. There were some fantastic books on that list and some real duds.

Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories Published

The Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories is a new metadata vocabulary that extends the Darwin Core Standard to make it possible to describe the inventories and sampling events that are used to collect organism occurrence data. This is the largest extension to Darwin Core since the original vocabulary was ratified in 2009 and it represents over three years of work by the Humboldt Extension Task Group. This group of international experts met weekly over that time period to develop the vocabulary, carry out implementation testing, and publish the vocabulary and associated documentation.