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New Digital Exhibits

One of the things I’ve been working on for the past year is developing support and workflows for digital exhibits in the Marriott Library. My first exposure to digital exhibits was back when I was involved in the Mountain West Digital Library, as part of a grant we produced a set of three exhibits for DPLA. The exhibit I worked on was Roosevelt’s Tree Army: The Civilian Conservation Corps. DPLA used Omeka for their exhibits, and as we were considering developing our own program for exhibits at the Marriott Library we debated between Omeka Classic and OmekaS. We ended up going with OmekaS, and we now have 4 exhibits available on that platform. The new exhibits page is available here: https://exhibits.lib.utah.edu and we have several more exhibits in development that will be available soon.

One of my goals for the exhibits is to provide additional context and narrative for items that are in the Digital Library and Marriott Library Special Collections. So far, we have collections centered on Hotel Utah, Glen Canyon, the Japanese American experience in Utah and the West, and Fighting Words, a multimedia exhibit focusing on rare books during the Revolutionary War era.

“Early Hotel Utah, exterior” from the Hotel Utah online exhibit.

One of the most enjoyable things about launching a digital exhibits program like this is finding new ways to collaborate with people in the library. The new exhibits have been a team effort, with support from staff in IT on web development and design, and exhibit content being developed by librarians and part-time student workers. Alison Elbrader and I spoke about the new digital exhibits at the Utah Library Association conference recently, and slides from that presentation are also available.


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