Building Accessible & Engaging Digital Exhibits: Two Approaches with Joseph Jarrell

Omeka and Squarespace are two popular content management systems that can host digital exhibits with documents, photos, and text, but their layout, visual appeal, and accessibility varies greatly.

Joseph Jarrell is a graduate student at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is currently working on his Master's degree in Medieval history with a focus on 12th Century English culture. Joseph has previously held the position of Graduate Assistant for the Center for Digital Humanities at Southern Miss from 2021-2022.

I was first exposed to Omeka during my undergraduate program when I took an upper-level Digital Humanities practicum course, and I learned it in small manageable pieces. This is important, because Omeka can be intimidating. There are multiple steps involved when creating your exhibits and collections, and each item uploaded requires detailed information (metadata). Also, to make significant changes to the layout or appearance of Omeka exhibits, a little bit of basic coding is required. While it took some time, I eventually felt comfortable making edits and working on the back end after a few weeks.  The final project for my class involved designing and constructing my own digital exhibit, and you can see the end result of that project here.

After about a year of helping to build other Omeka exhibits for USM's Center for Digital Humanities, I was part of a team that began experimenting with other digital platforms that might be more visually appealing and require users to click through as many separate pages as they work through an exhibit. We looked at a few options and consulted with the then-director of USM Library's Digital Lab, Elizabeth Le Beaud. Her favorite simple, user-friendly exhibit builder, and the one we settled on, is Squarespace. Most users may know this as a website-building platform, but Elizabeth showed us how simple it was to build visually appealing, well-organized digital exhibits that were readily accessible, especially for non-expert users. A great example of this is USM Library's Digital Collections site.

My first experience with Squarespace was in Summer 2022 when I helped build the CDH’s exhibit for the Mississippi Cookbook Collection. We used this as a test-exhibit, taking an existing, strong digital collection and experimented with how to make it accessible and visually appealing to experts and non-experts alike. Squarespace took significantly less time to learn how to use; the graduate student designers adapted easily to its various features. Unlike Omeka, we did not have to manipulate code and, for digital collections that already had a wealth of metadata stored elsewhere, we were able to simplify the information we provided at our introductory exhibits designed to attract and explain a larger collection before users dive into tens of thousands of records. Squarespace does not require you to code, either. Most of the necessary tools are already built in for users to customize the layout and appearance of pages with little or no training.

Each platform has its strengths. Omeka is a good place to start for understanding digital content management and publication, especially when it comes to understanding the importance of metadata. It has the Dublin Core metadata categories built into it, allowing you to seamlessly fill in the boxes with all the necessary metadata that information that provide information that enhances discoverability and accessibility for your project. I also think that one of the biggest strength of Omeka is that it is free to use (Squarespace can cost, even for use at a non-profit academic institution, about $280/year, though individual users can pay about $200 annually and can get 50% off that price for their first year. Omeka, therefore, may be the cost-effective option for small libraries and museums or for teachers to use in classrooms when creating small and sustainable projects that maintain field standards with Dublin Core metadata.

The main downside for Omeka is that it can be a bit clunky at times. Depending on the theme of the Omeka site, there may be a good amount of clicking required for a user to find information in it. As a content creator using Omeka, you may often run into errors or find that Omeka cannot do what you want it to do. In my own experience, Omeka works best with straightforward image and text designs built almost like a Wikipedia page. There is also a lot of work that the creator must do on the backend of Omeka. I had to learn a moderate amount of coding to change the appearance of my site or to fix errors. Uploading plugins and different themes required that I had to first download them directly from the Omeka website, and then go into Omeka’s files on the hosting site that I used to upload them into the directory. Even updates to the plugins had to be done this way. As such, Omeka proved to be very time-consuming even when doing seemingly simple tasks.

Squarespace is a much more streamlined content management platform. Most of its plugins are built-in and can be used to create more complex pages and websites with ease. Designing a digital exhibit is much easier because you can break each page down into segments with their own parts. The finished projects that I’ve seen on Squarespace are often more polished, better looking, and easier to navigate than most Omeka sites. It is also much easier to make more complex designs. Beyond just simple text and image designs, such as those made with Omeka, users can easily add more complex layouts such as carousels of images. While it is easier to use and more professional-looking, remember that cost issue with Squarespace. This cost can be prohibitive, especially for those just getting started on building digital exhibits.  As such, Squarespace may be better for long-term projects or schools that can absorb that cost. It won't be prohibitive for all, but it could be for classroom instruction or small, non-profit institutions.

Unlike Omeka, Squarespace does not have Dublin Core metadata elements built into it. This means that when adding documents into a digital exhibit with Squarespace, the creator is responsible for adding any metadata themselves. While this will not be a problem for anyone who has worked with metadata in the past, it can be overwhelming for those who have no experience with it. As such, Squarespace may provide users with a sleek, professional-looking site, but users who are unaware of the importance of metadata for helping users discover items at their site may skip metadata all together, limiting discoverability at their site and failing to meet field standards. If you decide you do want to include metadata, there is no built-in support for that; it's up to the designer to manage that on their own. It's certainly possible, but the lack of metadata support means this be a challenge for new users, especially students.

Both Squarespace and Omeka come with their advantages and disadvantages. Omeka is a great introduction to digital exhibit building, allowing users to build simple or complex exhibits and learn the basics of writing metadata at zero cost. However, creating more complex exhibits requires a bit of coding which, depending on a user’s background, may be intimidating. This is where Squarespace shines. While more costly, it is much easier to make professional, modern, and complex digital exhibits. At the end of the day, the best platform depends on the specific goals of an individual project.