A Static Web Approach to Digital Collections: Hands-On with CollectionBuilder
Looking for an agile, lightweight approach to developing digital collections and scholarship projects? Join us for a hands-on deep dive into CollectionBuilder, an open source project for generating digital collection websites driven by metadata and powered by modern static web technology.
Optimized for non-developers and simple hosting solutions, CollectionBuilder allows librarians, researchers, and educators to take ownership over their digital projects by lowering barriers to website creation and customization: users need only create a spreadsheet of metadata and corresponding directory of digital files to generate a digital collection. Once these are uploaded to CollectionBuilder, the platform employs a Jekyll static web generator to build a website for browsing and contextualizing the collection.
As workshop participants engage with CollectionBuilder, they will learn fundamental web and DH skills by working with plain text files, CSV data, Markdown, GitHub, and GitHub Pages to create and customize their very own digital collection. By the end of this workshop, participants 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. No programming experience is necessary; beginners from any background are welcome. Participants are asked to bring their own computers.
