Technical Infrastructure

Histories of the National Mall runs on Omeka.

Technical Specifications

Omeka supports the fundamental interpretive goals of the project, which include introducing Mall visitors to the history of the space and its development, together with the social, cultural, and political events that transpired there by presenting this material using geospatial and thematic modes of access. Omeka <omeka.org> is a leading open source (written for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and released under the GPL) collections-based web publishing platform developed by RRCHNM and the robust open source developer community it supports. Omeka is standards-based, grounded in a flexible Dublin Core Metadata Schema. Omeka takes a user-centered, access-focused approach to collections, emphasizing approachable, accessible web design.

To offer a mobile website that renders similar results in all major mobile browsers, the web designer built a custom responsive Omeka theme that reduces the width and padding of the header, footer, navigation, and columns, and adjusts the font sizes of headings and the body, so that the design fits comfortably within the confines of a smaller mobile browser window.

After testing multiple tools, the web developer built a custom mapping plugin using leaflet.js libraries that works with the existing Omeka Geolocation plugin.

See other sections of the Guide for longer discussions of how the Histories team built different parts of the website.

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