-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
1. Home
An open-source, no-install (and phone-friendly!) community flavor of CollectionBuilder for building multilingual digital collections, archives, and exhibits through a Google Spreadsheet.
CollectionBuilder-Remix (CB-Remix) is an interface built on top of CollectionBuilder. Like all CollectionBuilder templates, CB-Remix is powered by Jekyll and hosted for free on GitHub Pages, generating static webpages that require minimal resources and no server-side code from users.
CB-Remix extends the functionality of the bilingual implementation of CollectionBuilder-GH originally developed by Piñata Catalog, a bilingual English–Spanish excihition of Latino children's book collection, and later on the the Bajubá Digital Archive, which restructured that code and added Portuguese as a third language. CB-Remix expands on the work of both projects into a reusable template, so that any project — not just the two collections it grew out of — can spin up a multilingual, spreadsheet-driven CollectionBuilder site.
The CollectionBuilder family already includes several official flavors, each suited to a different workflow:
- CollectionBuilder-GH — This template is the base for CB-Remix, which allows users to build webpages using GitHub Pages.
- CollectionBuilder-CSV — a more flexible, stand-alone version built to run locally with Jekyll installed. Some of the advanced features in this version (like thumbnails) were taken from this version to CB-Remix.
- CollectionBuilder-Sheets — a version that loads metadata live from a published CSV or Google Sheet, enabling fast, collaborative prototyping. CB-Remix expands on CollectionBuilder-Sheets to make the process of using a Google Sheet even easier and more intuitive. By expanding on the use of Sheets tabs, users can edit all the main relevant configurations of the project directly from the spreadsheet, without needing to edit internal files of the project.
CB-Remix is called a "remix" because it borrows the parts of each version of CollectionBuilderfor a lightweight, collaborative, much more beginner-friendly workflow: the teaching-friendly repository structure of GH, the flexibility of CSV, and — most importantly — the live, spreadsheet-first metadata connection of Sheets. By reducing the need to edit internal files from GitHub, building with CB-Remix is significantly less prone to bugs and configuration errors.
Similarly to CollectionBuilder, CB-Remix follows the minimal computing principles that guide the project.
CB-Remix pushes that philosophy further by minimizing what a contributor needs to touch GitHub for at all. In practice, a collection can be built and maintained using nothing more than a phone with a browser that can open Google Sheets and GitHub. GitHub is only needed for three moments:
- Uploading the digital object files (images, PDFs, audio, etc.) into the repository's objects folder.
- Pasting the published spreadsheet link into the site configuration, connecting the live Google Sheet to the CollectionBuilder site.
- Rebuilding the project to render your changes through GitHub Actions.
Everything else—adding new collection item, editing metadata, translating labels and descriptions, editing navigation bar, fixing typos—happens directly in the Google Spreadsheet, where multiple collaborators can work at the same time, from any device, with no local software and no merge conflicts.
CB-Remix is aimed at:
- Small archives, community collections, and classroom projects that need a bilingual or multilingual site but don't have dedicated developer support.
- Teams who want several people editing metadata simultaneously without version-control friction.
- Anyone who wants to build and maintain a digital collection primarily from a mobile device.
- Site: eugestumm.github.io/CollectionBuilder-Remix
- Code: github.com/eugestumm/collectionbuilder-remix
- Parent project: collectionbuilder.github.io
CollectionBuilder-Remix is developed by Euge Helyantus Stumm, building on CollectionBuilder-GH by Evan Peter Williamson, Devin Becker, and Olivia Wikle, and on the bilingual groundwork of the Piñata Catalog by Gabriela Baeza Ventura, Olivia Wikle, and apsanchez7, and the Bajubá Digital Archive by Euge Stumm.
If you use CollectionBuilder-Remix in your work, please cite it — see the CITATION.cff file in the repository for the full citation and reference list.