DHSI Show and Tell 2026

DHSI 2026

Welcome to “Creating Digital Collections with Minimal Infrastructure: Hands On with CollectionBuilder for Teaching and Exhibits”, Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2026!

This inspiring collection of (prototype) collections collects the digital projects created by participants in our course at DHSI 2026 hosted at beautiful Université de Montréal. We are happy share these cool projects which were created with great diligence, enthusiasm, and care–over about four days time!

Course Description

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 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 accessibility, metadata creation, and 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.

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Day One Icebreaker

We are going to collaboratively edit a spreadsheet that is currently driving this collection site.

Find the line that has your first name, edit only that line!

Best Meal Metadata

Think about your favorite meal, maybe a recent one, and fill in the metadata based on that experience:

• creator - your preferred name.
• title - name of the place you had the meal.
• date - year of the meal, or ISO date (yyyy-mm-dd).
• description - about the meal and its significance.
• subject - Provide some ingredients/keywords that would be helpful for categorizing your meal. Separate tags by semi-colons and do not use hashtags.
• location - Location of restaurant or place (city, state, country) e.g., Omaha, NE, USA
• latitiude - Note: You can get latitude and longitude by right clicking on a Google Maps location and copying/pasting the coordinates.
• longitude
• format - the format of a representative image (image/jpeg, image/png, or if no image record)
• filename - a full URL direct to a representative image file

Introductions

We will use our new collection to introduce everyone in the course!

• Name
• About your Meal
• Where you are coming from
• Background with digital collections and/or DH
• Project ideas

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About CollectionBuilder-Sheets

This site is generated using CollectionBuilder-Sheets, a template for creating simple digital exhibit websites by loading collection metadata directly from a CSV, designed for teaching digital library skills and easy hosting on GitHub Pages.

Using CB-Sheets, it is possible to use a live Google Sheets spreadsheet for your collection metadata, allowing you to see the outcome of metadata edits update immediately. This enables active collaboration to prototype collections with minimal set up.

Learn More

For full details of creating your own collection site, visit CollectionBuilder Documentation!

The template repository features four objects from the University of Idaho Library’s Digital Collections. Featured image by JJ Ying on Unsplash.