Archivists, Rare Books Librarians, and Library IT staff have been hard at work revamping our digital exhibition space. Some of our older exhibits have been migrated to the new platform, Omeka S, and others have been given a bit of a refresh. And now that the archivists and librarians have spent some time familiarizing themselves with the new platform, we are ready to create new digital exhibitions to share with all of you.
The new Online Exhibitions Page, while not findable on the Becker website just yet, is available for viewing. Previously built websites from our former collection of digital exhibits are preserved under the “Legacy Exhibits” section, such as Prophetic Illustration in the Paracelsus Collection – 2015. The legacy exhibits are being preserved for historical, contextual, and archival purposes, even if the exhibits themselves have visually or linguistically aged.
Some exhibits have migrated with more attention to relinking resources that were broken in old exhibits. For example, Medical Journeys: Transplanting Medical Knowledge Across the World has become Medical Journeys: Traveling Scholars from the 19th and 20th Centuries. Both versions of the digital exhibit still exist, but the updated one is more accessible and reconnected to the resources Becker Archives has to offer.
Perhaps the best part about the new platform, however, is that it enables the archivists and rare books librarians to build and publish digital exhibits without having to build a website from scratch for each exhibit. We hope that this will empower the archivists and rare books librarians to create more new digital exhibits in the future, so be on the lookout for more popping up on our digital exhibition page like Comrades in Science? US-USSR Exchanges in Health and Medicine. We are looking forward to creating more digital exhibitions to share more of our archives and rare books collections with all of you.