The National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities has awarded $49,919 to the University of Idaho, in partnership with the University of Oregon, for the project “Powering Digital Humanities Teaching and Learning with Static Web Approaches.” This grant was one of twenty awarded through the competitive Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program and will support the creation of curricular modules to help teach the CollectionBuilder web tool in humanities classes.

Three UO Libraries faculty will be part of this grant: Digital Scholarship Librarian Kate Thornhill and Research Data Management and Reproducibility Librarian Gabriele Hayden will serve as co-PIs, and Rayne Vieger, Coordinator of eLearning & Open Educational Resources (OER) Librarian, will provide instructional design expertise.

CollectionBuilder was developed by the University of Idaho as a tool for creating digital collection and exhibit websites with rich metadata and requiring minimal technical resources. With a CSV of metadata, CollectionBuilder can create a variety of interactive visualizations and offers a number of templates.

The NEH grant will help bring CollectionBuilder into the classroom in partnership with Mattie Burkert, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities, UO Department of English, and allow students to engage with minimal computing principles, metadata, and build a digital collection and/or exhibit from beginning to end. UO librarians will bring expertise in pedagogy, digital curation, data management, and instructional design.