CollectionBuilder Bulletin: September 2025

Hi Everyone,

Wow, late September already–Autumn is underway here in the north with leaves falling and campuses buzzing!

We don’t have any big news to report, but a number of little things that you can peruse below. Feel free to send us your news, ideas, and feedback to share!

Best,

- The CollectionBuilder Team

This month’s news:

Teaching

• Core Forum 2025: Nov 12 - 14, the CB team will be teaching a pre-conference workshop at Core Forum in Denver. There is still time to register (early bird rate ends Oct 5)! Join us, and let us know if you want to meet up in Denver!
• LIS Student Program Reflection: Back in June (seems like an era ago!), our second LIS Student Program cohort wrapped up. We really appreciate the experience and regret the disruption caused by our IMLS grant being terminated. Several participants wrote blog posts reflecting on their experience and sharing projects. Please take a look, if you haven’t already:
  • Amaobi Otiji, Rutgers University, Unforgotten: Preserving Black Memory through CollectionBuilder
  • Dominique Stringer, University of Kansas, Introducing Home-Making: A Jewish Kansan Storytelling Project
  • Lea McMahan, University of Tennessee, Building a Digital Collection with CollectionBuilder: “The Golden Girls of Porter High School”
• Digital Librarian Program: The loss of our IMLS grant funding has changed the shape of our planned CB LIS Incentives Programs… however, a group of six librarians has decided to continue as a cohort without external funding. It’s been fascinating to meet digital librarians from across the country with a variety of different contexts and goals. We are looking forward to the continued conversation!

Template updates

• Git defaults set up: A few people have encountered issues with unexpected error messages when merging. This is due to a change in the defaults set by a fresh Git install. To avoid confusion, we have added one step to Configure Git in the CB-Docs where you set pull.rebase to false (the traditional default).
• Media modal includes: two new feature includes were added to CB-CSV, video-modal.html and audio-modal.html. These create a clickable “card” that opens a bootstrap modal containing the video or audio item. This is helpful since the modal contains the full item information and transcript–and closing the modal stops the media playing, which is important if you would like to feature multiple media items on a page!
• Library Assets: all library assets (open source stuff not written by the CB team) have been updated. Additionally, a new lib-assets: option has been added to “_config.yml”. This will be useful to a few folks who host multiple CB projects on a central server (i.e. like University of Idaho Library) and want to maintain a single copy of their library assets (rather than one for each project).

Shared projects

• Recently shared projects: thank you to those submitting items to the CB Examples site! Here are a few recent submissions:
  • Miriam McFate Travel Journal - 1926 - a unique and fascinating custom project by regular CB contributor Mark McFate. It implements a number of experimental features, such as text-based Items, tweaks to the map, and Pagefind search.
  • The Maxine & Jack Zarrow Collection: a tour through the collection - a project from the OSU Library and OSU Museum of Art to create a guide to a collection gift, providing insight into both the content and the collectors.

Get Involved / Connect with Us

Below are some ways to stay connected with the CollectionBuilder community:

• Join our Slack channel
• Post questions on our GitHub Discussion Board
• Questions? Email us at collectionbuilder.team@gmail.com