In the fall of 2016, Bryn Mawr College Curator Carrie Robbins approached Digital Scholarship Specialist Alicia Peaker about finding better ways to showcase student curated exhibitions of our over 50,000 artifacts and art objects. Students curate several exhibitions each year in temporary and borrowed spaces, but the labor they put into these exhibitions often disappears with the objects when they’re returned to storage. Carrie wanted to find better ways to document and promote the work the students were producing.
To address this need, we wrote and were awarded a microgrant from The Association for Computers and the Humanities to collaborate with Craig Dietrich of Scalar, a scholarly digital publishing platform. Scalar has been designed primarily for media-rich digital scholarship, but through the grant we sought to extend its applications to digital exhibitions. We achieved this by producing two new page layouts, the “scrolling path” and “people” layouts. Each of these layouts relies heavily on Scalar’s existing features and powerful flexibility. While the layouts, designed by Nathanael Roesch (Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art), were created with student curated exhibitions in mind, we hope they’ll be useful for other members of our community. To see a live version of the template, visit our test site. To see the template in action, check out The Tale of Genji. To try out the new templates on your own Scalar site, contact Alicia Peaker.
Further development and refinement of the Scalar Exhibition Template will continue after the grant’s conclusion. If you have questions about the template or suggestions about its improvement please direct them to Alicia Peaker.