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.
View digital-exhibit-lab demo: https://learn-static.github.io/digital-exhibit-lab/
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 the "Mining the Archives", History 454 exhibit and assignment outline.
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.
The digital-exhibit-lab template repository contains:
- documentation for instructors (in the "docs" folder, starting with this file!).
- template guideline pages for the learners that are published as part of the exhibit website (in "pages/project/" folder, or view the demo guidelines).
- a fully configured version of CollectionBuilder-Sheets, that will generate a digital exhibit from your project metadata.
Instructors will make a copy of the template to configure and customize for their specific context and learning objectives.
Learn-Static documentation and general web content is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
This license does NOT include any objects or images used in digital collections, which may have individually applied licenses described by a "rights" field.
CollectionBuilder code is licensed MIT.
This license does not include external dependencies included in the assets/lib directory, which are covered by their individual licenses.