Contents: About Digital Exhibit Lab | The Project | Documentation | Tech

About Digital Exhibit Lab

Digital Exhibit Lab is a Learn-Static template designed to teach digital scholarship concepts and critical literacies via a hands-on experience creating a digital collection. Students are invited to do archival research, curation, description, and metadata, resulting in a final published digital exhibit website.

Working with their own digital collection allows students to think critically about the processes of creating archives, digital archives, and research, while building web and data literacies. The project can be framed in different ways to emphasize various aspects of the process or learn specific digital skills.

This site is a demonstration of the basic exhibit features.

The template is based on CollectionBuilder-Sheets, a framework for creating digital exhibits driven by a metadata spreadsheet.

Powered by a static web approach, CollectionBuilder minimizes the technical overhead, maintenance, and complexity–if hosted on GitHub (or similar code hosting service), creating a project does not require a server or installing software. This enables individual instructors, librarians, DH labs, or even the students themselves to set up the digital exhibit. It offers a viable alternative to heavier collection platforms such as Omeka or CONTENTdm, opening up more opportunities to bring digital collections into the classroom.

For a demonstration of the learning sequence used in an undergraduate course see “Mining the Archives”, History 454 and assignment outline.

The Project

Digital Exhibit Lab projects can include different methods of curating objects to include in the collection, starting from a pre-created collection, curating from existing digital collections, digitizing new objects, or a combination. Project steps can include:

• Archival Research: Working with special collections and/or archives departments, students explore and do hands-on research with primary source materials related to the course subjects.
• Digitization: From their archival research, students select primary sources to digitize. Working with the digitization lab or DH center, they scan their selected items and prepare digital files.
• Curation: Students explore their institution’s digital collections or specific external collections to do online archival research. They select items from existing digital collections, creating metadata for their curated records.
• Description and Metadata: Students create metadata following a collection template to describe their digitized and curated items.
• Exhibit: Once all objects and metadata are submitted, the template generates the final digital collection.
• Research and Reflection: Students write papers and/or reflections informed by their archival research. Traditional term papers could use images from and citations to the course collection. Alternatively, students can write multi-modal essays directly in the exhibit website using markdown.

Documentation

To learn more about how to create your own Digital Exhibit Lab project, please check out documentation:

• Documentation for instructors is contained in the “docs” folder of the template, starting with “overview.md”.
• Instructions for students are published as part of the collection website. These will be customized by instructors for their specific context and version of the assignment. See the Project Overview of this demo site for an example of the guidelines.
• Detailed information about CollectionBuilder (the framework Digital Exhibit Lab is based on) can be found in CB-Docs.

Image credit: Mountain Consolidated Mine 300 ft. level East still floor [no. 1223], Carleton Watkins