CollectionBuilder Bulletin: September 2026

By Evan Williamson | September 24, 2026
Tags: newsletter

Hi Everyone,

The big CB news for Fall: our Community Developers Program is open for proposals!

CB Community Developers Program

Do you have an idea to enhance or build on CollectionBuilder that you would like to develop and release to the community? The Community Developers Program is a grant funded opportunity that will support a wide variety of projects that enhance, extend, experiment with, and/or document CollectionBuilder. We hope folks have great ideas for new resources that we can fund!

Visit the program page for all the details and submit via our short proposal form by October 9th, 2026.

The timeline for the projects is relatively short, everything needs to be completed by February 2027. A bit more than a year ago there was chaos as our IMLS funding was terminated (like so many grants across America), disrupting our programs and planning. Then we had the uncertainty of our funding being restored and scrambling to figure out how we could salvage our initial plans. Now the grant period is coming to a close, we are hoping this opportunity will jump start some new developers, create new resources, and help us wrap up strong.

CB Updates

  • Image Comparison Feature - a new Item display template and include feature was added to CB-CSV that adds an interactive comparison of any two images stacked on top of each other with a slider to reveal one or the other (or fade between them using opacity). It uses Before-After–think JuxtaposeJS, but updated and more flexible!
  • DHSI 2026 - we had a great experience teaching at DHSI once again, check out the DHSI Show and Tell 2026 collection for some fascinating projects from the week!
  • Image Embeddings Search - I wrote a post about my experiments with using small neural network models to provide reverse image and vector text embeddings search in a CB project.
  • CB Add Ons - these packages to add new features to CB projects have been around for awhile, but they finally got a home page!

Sharing

Recent projects that were shared with us:

  • Sedimentation - we were very excited to see “Sedimentation: An Archive of Glen Canyon” by Hannah Green (University of Idaho) win the 2026 American Studies Association Digital Humanities Newcomer Project Award. Devin worked closely with Hannah to create the project exploring the demise and resurgence of Glen Canyon under Lake Powell’s rise and fall, weaving together archival photographs, maps, and narrative histories of the region’s geological, ecological, and human pasts. Ideas from this collaboration have percolated into CB-Essay.
  • Campus Cornerstones: A mapped history of Iowa State University shared by Erin Ridnour, features building information illustrated by historical photographs, maps, and modern GIS data.
  • Exploring the Journey of Asian Women in STEM at ISU is an oral history project shared by Erin Ridnour, exploring the narratives, challenges, and triumphs experienced by Asian women faculty members in STEM fields at Iowa State University.
  • Ukraine’s Built Heritage under Attack shared by Jonathan Sandkühler, is a custom exhibit project focusing on the losses suffered by places of culture and learning in Ukraine.
  • Leipzig Footnotes: Leipzig’s pavement has history shared by Jonathan Sandkühler is an active public history project collecting personal experiences and encounters with Leipzig’s sidewalks, streets and pavements–send in your stories!

Get Involved / Connect with Us

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