Setup

To access and develop our digital collections, you will need a GitHub account and some software installed on your computer. For collaborators focusing on metadata and object work, this is unnecessary–however, if you would like to preview and test a collection on your computer, write Harvester posts, or contribute to the library website, having this “development environment” set up will be helpful!

GitHub

To access the collection templates you will need a GitHub account. Check the notes on CB-Docs for more information.

We suggest setting one up with a “professional” non-U of I email account–this ensures you will have access even if you leave U of I, but also not connected to your personal email–if you don’t have one, set up a new Gmail account since we often end up on Google Sheets and Docs for work anyway!

Once you have a GitHub account set up, email your account name to the maintainers to get added to our GitHub organization.

Our org, uidaholib owns all the project repositories to ensure continued access and easy collaboration. Digital Collection team members will be added to the digital-collections-team. This team has write access to all the relevant templates and project repositories.

Using the teams allows us to change membership and manage access with out needing to add/remove individual accounts to every repository–please use the teams and do not unnecessarily add individuals to repositories!

Software

To be able to develop and test a collection on your local computer you will need Git, VS Code, Ruby, and Jekyll installed. To generate image derivatives you will need ImageMagick and GhostScript (not all DC team members will need to do this!).

Please follow the software install instructions on cb-docs. Pay attention to configuring VS Code to avoid issues later!

Software	Process
Google Sheets	Create and edit metadata spreadsheets; create CSV
Git, GitHub Desktop	Copy the templates to your local and sync work
VS Code	Edit the project files
Ruby, Jekyll	Test the site locally; build the final site
ImageMagick, GhostScript	Generate image derivatives
OpenRefine	Bulk transform and improve metadata

Check Commandline software

Open “Git Bash” (on windows) or terminal. Typing the commands below should give you a version number if they are installed correctly:

• ruby -v
• jekyll -v
• magick --version