Unique Exhibits and Minimal Infrastructure: Creating Static Digital Collections With CollectionBuilder and GitHub Pages
Looking for an agile, lightweight approach to developing digital collections and scholarship projects? Participants in this workshop will use the static web framework CollectionBuilder to create a digital collection website that encourages browsing and contextualizing items through timelines, maps, and word cloud visualizations.
The high cost and IT requirements of digital collection platforms are often a barrier to creating and customizing new digital projects. CollectionBuilder is optimized for iterative development and simple hosting solutions, empowering users to take greater ownership over their digital projects and enabling sustainable custom sites on minimal infrastructure. Utilizing well-structured metadata and a directory of digital files, CollectionBuilder employs a Jekyll static web generator to create a website for visualizing and accessing the collection.
Participants will explore a variety of development environments (including GitHub Codespaces as well as Ruby and Jekyll for local development) as they walk through the steps of creating a collection, touching on concepts such as generating derivative images of their digital objects, configuring their collection using YAML and CSV files, and adding interpretive content. Workshop activities will also include setting up GitHub Pages to serve a CollectionBuilder site as well as advanced customization topics such as adding compound objects, customizing CSS, and navigating hosting options.