DHSI 2026

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

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

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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.

Change the Metadata!

Create your own Metadata

To create metadata compatible with this CollectionBuilder-Sheets instance the best way to get started is to make of copy of our template in Google Drive:

CollectionBuilder Metadata Template

Alternatively, you can download the template CSV and work on your local machine. We suggest editing your CSV using LibreOffice Calc, OpenRefine, or Google Sheets (and do not suggest using Excel, since Excel’s CSV output is not correctly formatted).

Describe your items in your copy of the template, following the Metadata Guidelines.

Once you have items added you can test your metadata by clicking the “Change the Metadata” button above.

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.