Digital Exhibits Guide

Once your exhibit has been approved, the Digital Exhibits Committee will contact you with login information for Scalar and Box. To log in to Scalar, go to exhibits.chicagocollections.org and click "sign in" at the top right of the page. Once you have entered your email and password, you'll be taken to your Scalar homepage, where your exhibit(s) will be listed under "Your Books" (Scalar calls exhibits "books").

A "book" will already have been set up for you in Scalar with the title you specified in your proposal. After you click through your book link, you'll be taken to your exhibit front page, which will be blank if you haven't had a chance to set it up yet. You can edit the page and/or create new pages by clicking on the pencil and plus sign logos at the top right.

First though, you'll want to double-check that the book theme is set to "Chicago Collections - Scalar 2," which is what changes the formatting to match general Chicago Collections branding. To do this (and to edit the title of your exhibit as well as other global information), click on the wrench. In the "Book Properties" tab, choose "Chicago Collections - Scalar 2" in the dropdown menu for Interface (under the Style section).

At this point your book is in a private sandbox - you can play around as much as you like with the media, settings, and formats. We recommend experimenting with the page templates and paths (found at the bottom of the editing page). We also recommend experimenting with third-party plugins and platforms, which Scalar has a guide for. The Scalar blog has lots of excellent examples of the different Scalar functionalities and you can learn more about the functionality of Scalar in the Scalar User's Guide.

And a general note: it is a little difficult to have multiple people in Scalar at the same time since you can't see what everyone is doing. If you have multiple people working on your exhibit, be sure to coordinate who is working on what and when.

Explicit instructions on the many different ways to add media to your exhibit can be found in Scalar's resources. Here are a few ideas we found helpful while making "The Sporting Life: Stories from Chicago Collections archives" exhibit:

• Single pieces of media - highlight the text you would like linked to the image and click on insert Scalar media link; if you don't want to highlight any text, choose insert inline Scalar media link
• Multiple pieces of media - there are a few different ways to do this with the widgets (you can insert these linked to specific text or just inline in the text, as above). We ended up using the carousels the most since it mimicked image slide shows, but we encourage you to experiment!
• Maps and timelines - there are Scalar widgets for these functions, but Scalar also allows you to insert your own iFrames
• Image captions - as mentioned above, single image captions come from the title and/or description, while widget captions can be customized. Refer to our Scalar Code Customizations in the Appendix for information on how to customize text under both single and multi-part images
• Image metadata - you can edit image metadata by clicking through to the image page (you can get to this from your dashboard or from the exhibit page itself), and edit the page as if it were an exhibit page
• Thumbnail images - each page can have a thumbnail associated with it. Pick this at the bottom of the editing page under the "styling" menu. This image is what shows up if you want to make navigational cards for any of your pages
  • Background images - each page can also have a background image associated with it - we found this slowed down page load times and would not recommend it