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Creating Digital Collections with Minimal Infrastructure: Hands On With CollectionBuilder for

Event Language

English

June 2 June 6

Format

in person/face-à-face

Teaching and Exhibits
Olivia Wikle, Evan Williamson, Devin Becker

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 and 2024.

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. 

3150 Rue Jean Brillant
Montreal, Québec H3T 1N7 Canada
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