By Ryan Hedrick
There are two Indiana University alums in Moscow, Idaho that are making waves in the digital collection space.
Devin Becker, MLS 2010, and Olivia Wikle, MLS 2018, are part of a team out of the University of Idaho that created and maintain CollectionBuilder, a new free tool for publishing online digital collections.
“CollectionBuilder is a static web framework for building digital collections, digital exhibits and digital scholarship projects,” said Wikle, the digital initiatives librarian at U of I.
Frustrated with other digital collection platforms, Becker and one of his colleagues initially had the idea for CollectionBuilder and started working on it in 2017.
“We started building it because of frustrations with other teaching tools like Omeka and the platforms we were using like CONTENTdm,” said Becker, head of data and digital services. According to Becker, the initial idea was to create a platform that allowed for easier content editing and easier metadata object connection.
Wikle joined the team in 2018, which is the same year that the team decided on the CollectionBuilder name and really began to raise awareness of their new framework. In 2019 the team received their first round of grant funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
That initial round of funding was used to really kick start CollectionBuilder and drive it to a wider community. Wikle said that after the first round of funding three other institutions had become official CollectionBuilder partners, and there was growing interest among other institutions to start using the framework
“Often it was ILS instructors using it in the classroom,” Wikle said. “We’re noticing it catch on especially for digital scholarship in classroom teaching. We have a new IMLS grant that started last fall in 2022. For that grant we specifically requested funding to hire a librarian that could kind of further that community building.”
Becker added that interest in CollectionBuilder is growing beyond just universities in the United States. There is now a Spanish version of CollectionBuilder with instructors in Germany and the Philippines teaching the framework and using it for their own purposes.
John Walsh, Associate Professor of Information and Library Science at IU, is a CollectionBuilder convert. He switched from teaching Omeka, another digital collection platform, to teaching CollectionBuilder in his Digital Libraries class. Walsh taught both Becker and Wikle during their time at IU, and he is on the project’s advisory board.
Wikle and Becker spoke a bit about the advantages that CollectionBuilder has over some of the other digital collection platforms like Omeka. One of the largest advantages they see is their platform’s ease of use. Users just upload representations of the objects they want to feature in their collections or exhibits. The metadata for each object is then entered into a spreadsheet, which has a standardized template. After all of the content is finalized, CollectionBuilder automatically generates a site using Jekyll, a static website generator. CollectionBuilder sites can be hosted on any server a user may choose and all CollectionBuilder code is open and stored on GitHub.
“The initial goal was ‘let’s create our own thing,’” said Becker. “The things that are out there aren’t perfect so we wanted to create a thing that is better. ContentDM and Omeka are really great. They have great aspects to them. They have sophisticated code in them that we don’t really have in some ways. Our’s does a lot of things that they don’t and is a lot easier to use and better for preservation work than those platforms.
Wikle also spoke about how their CollectionBuilder sites, because they are static websites and not subject to future CollectionBuilder changes once generated, are longer lasting and require minimal upkeep.
Both Becker and Wikle said CollectionBuilder will continue to be developed and improved upon, with Becker heading those efforts from the University of Idaho. Wikle on the other hand will soon be leaving her current position to take a position at another institution. However, she says that won’t stop her from continuing to work on CollectionBuilder.
“I think the CollectionBuilder project itself is bigger than the University of Idaho by this point,” She said. “So, I’m still going to be working on CollectionBuilder even when I leave. I’ll still be on the grant, and hopefully on future grants. I think we’ll continue to change the library world with CollectionBuilder.”
** For further information about CollectionBuilder visit their website. Also, Devin Becker and Olivia Wikle are happy to help anyone considering using or teaching CollectionBuilder. Contact information can also be found on the CollectionBuilder website. **