Creating Digital Collections with Minimal Infrastructure: Hands On With CollectionBuilder for Teaching and Exhibits (DHSI 2026)

Description

This course introduces fundamental web and DH skills using CollectionBuilder, an open source framework 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 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. They will also have built their own digital exhibit, such as those built by our previous DHSI classes in 2023, 2024, and 2025.

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.

Instructor(s)

Olivia Wikle is the Head of Digital Scholarship and Initiatives at Iowa State University, where she collaborates on projects involving digital scholarship, digital collections, and the institutional repository. She is a co-developer of the CollectionBuilder (https://collectionbuilder.github.io/) static web framework, and her research interests include sustainability in digital libraries and digital literacy instruction.

Evan Peter Williamson is the Digital Infrastructure Librarian and Head of Digital Scholarship and Open Strategies at the University of Idaho Library, working with the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning to bring cool projects, enlightening workshops, and innovative services to life. Despite a background in Art History, Classical Studies, and Archives, he always manages to get involved in all things digital. His recent focus has been on data driven, minimal infrastructure web development, currently embodied in the CollectionBuilder project.

Devin Becker is the Co-Director of the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL) and the Associate Dean of Research and Instruction at the University of Idaho Library. His recent CollectionBuilder-based digital scholarship projects include Storying Extinction,  Keeping Watch, and Tender Spaces.  His first book of poetry, Shame | Shame, won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and was published by BOA Editions Ltd.

Click here for an example of previous syllabus and course material (2025)