DHSI Show and Tell 2023
a collection of (prototype) collections
Contents: About the Collection | Course Abstract | About the Site | Tech
About the Collection
This inspiring collection of (prototype) collections collects the digital projects created by participants in Creating Digital Collections with Minimal Infrastructure: Hands On with CollectionBuilder for Teaching and Exhibits, a course at Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2023 hosted at beautiful University of Victoria. We are happy share these cool projects which were created with great diligence, enthusiasm, and care–over about four days time!
Course Abstract
This course introduces fundamental web and DH skills using CollectionBuilder, an open source project for building digital collection and exhibit websites driven by metadata and hosted on a lightweight infrastructure. The high cost and IT requirements of digital collection platforms are often a barrier to creating new collections for sharing or teaching humanities research. CollectionBuilder is optimized for non-developers and simple hosting solutions, allowing researchers to take greater ownership over their digital projects and lowering barriers to customization. Scholars in this course will learn CollectionBuilder by engaging in a scaffolded approach with hands-on experience in digital library foundations such as scanning and metadata creation to web development. Building on these skills, students will learn the basics of working with plain text files, CSV data, Markdown, Jekyll, Git, GitHub, and GitHub Pages in order to create and customize their very own digital collection. By the end of this course, students will have gained the knowledge and independence necessary to implement CollectionBuilder in contexts that include creating and disseminating research collections and custom digital exhibits, or teaching digital libraries in the classroom. This is a hands-on course that will cover basics of digitization, metadata, and web programming fundamentals. No programming experience is necessary, although you should have a strong interest to learn! Participants are asked to bring their own computers. All software used in the course is free, open source, and cross platform and will be installed during class time. Optionally, participants are invited to bring along a small collection of physical items to digitize, digital files (images, pdfs, audio) to feature in a digital collection, or metadata exported from an existing collection hosted on CONTENTdm.
About the Site
This site is generated using CollectionBuilder-Sheets, an experimental template that directly parses CSVs to create small digital collection exhibits on GitHub Pages designed for teaching digital library skills.
Using CB-Sheets, it is possible to use a Google Sheets spreadsheet for your collection metadata, allowing you to see the outcome of metadata edits update immediately.
For full details of creating your own collection site, visit CollectionBuilder Documentation!
Technical Credits - CollectionBuilder
This digital collection is built with CollectionBuilder, an open source framework for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that is developed by faculty librarians at the University of Idaho Library following the Lib-Static methodology.
The site started from the CollectionBuilder-Sheets template which utilizes the static website generator Jekyll and GitHub Pages to build and host digital collections and exhibits.