Like Omeka, Scalar is another scholar-oriented content management system, developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at the University of Southern California. Scalar is designed to be a platform for “media-rich scholarly publishing”, and it allows users to add and annotate text, image, audio and video components, and connect those components in linear or non-linear narratives. Scalar is available as a free hosted service, though the software itself can also be downloaded and installed separately.

A project that presents and provides extensive commentary on audio or video could benefit from Scalar, which has robust multimedia annotation capabilities out-of-the-box. Implementing good multimedia annotation as an embedded part of a website (as opposed to pulling in video and its annotation from an external source like YouTube) is significantly more challenging with other content management systems. Even compared to Omeka, there is a relative paucity of extensions available for Scalar, and it has a smaller user base than the other content management systems described here. If rich multimedia annotation is not an essential part of your project, another system would probably offer greater flexibility and a larger user support community.