This page contains the information for Assignment 1a: Adding Content to Your CollectionBuilder Site.

Adding Content to Your CB Collection Site

This assignment builds on the CollectionBuilder template site that you created last week. You should use the site you created in last week’s lab.

Your task is to gather the components for the digital items represented by the URIs located at the Library of Congress’s namespace (i.e., loc.gov) and indicated in the file loc-resource-list.txt located in the course data files repository.

You will need: a digital image file for each one, and as much metadata about each as you can find. Your goal is to restructure all of this into information that CollectionBuilder can use, then republish it on your site. Each item should publish on its own page and look something like this sample page.

Decide on an identifier scheme

To link together the metadata and files comprising the digital objects, you will need to create a standard naming scheme. I suggest some combination of letters and numbers, joined together in a standard pattern. For example, you could use some abbreviation of your collection, an underscore, and an item number, such as nc_001 where nc is “new collection” with an appended iterated number after the underscore. Another possibility would be to use the LCCN numbers for each object.

Find and organize the digital objects

In some cases, the files may not be immediately downloadable. In others, they will be easy to find. In either case, you are looking for a high resolution digital image in a jpeg or tif format. Once you locate the file, save it and rename it according to the identifier scheme you created above. Once the file is downloaded and renamed, move it to your site’s objects directory. Make sure the file’s name matches the objectid column in your metadata spreadsheet.

Record the metadata for each item

CollectionBuilder supports standard DublinCore elements for digital objects. Consult each of the above resources, and complete the metadata entry for each one. To do this, you may use the sample CSV template provided in the course data repository

Note: to use the template, you can upload to GoogleSheets, edit there, then download a CSV copy to add to your collection site. Or, you can create in Python or another editor. Note that the CollectionBuilder docs suggest that editing the CSV in Excel will cause problems (due to the way that Excel encodes the CSV files, particularly line endings).

Deliverables

  • Link to your updated and working CollectionBuilder site, now populated with the four items that you created metadata for (all still publishing from your GitHub repo)
  • Invite the course instructor to collaborate on the repo

Resources