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Pairing Open Exhibits software with Omeka platform creates a mobile multitouch experience

Over the last two years, Ideum has been working with the Omeka team to produce Omeka Everywhere, a multitouch table and mobile application utilizing Open Exhibits software and drawing from Omeka’s digital collection content management system.

Funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS MG-30-0037-1), the project team includes the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, The University of Connecticut’s Digital Media and Design Department, and Ideum.

The Omeka Everywhere app uses the Omeka API to connect to online collections. Institutions can modify the Omeka Everywhere source code and easily create mobile apps that connect to their online collections.

App users can interact with collection items and sorting by keywords, zooming in on images, and learning more from information displayed on the flipside of each image. Users can also save favorites from the collection as they browse.

Omeka Everywhere is for museums, historical societies, special collections libraries, and anyone who is interested in extending their Omeka online collection to mobile users. In addition, the mobile application can be paired with a multitouch table or touch wall experience. This unique feature allows in-gallery visitors to view and seamlessly share collection items between devices.

The mobile application is compatible with both iPhone and Android devices. The Omeka Everywhere mobile application and the touch screen Windows application are free and open source. The Android version of the Omeka Everywhere app can be downloaded from the Google Play Store. The open-source application is available on [GitHub](https://github.com/ideum/omeka-everywhere).

We’ve previously posted about the Omeka Everywhere project and the challenge of creating touch table to mobile applications for museum visitors. You can read that post here, [The Hard Problem of Connecting Mobile Apps to Touch Tables](http://ideum.com/news/problem-connecting-apps-to-tables).

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services [award number MG-30-0037-1].