Digital Exhibits Guide

Your exhibit is your interpretation of Chicago Collections resources, and we want to encourage you to be creative. We found that some guidelines were helpful though, so we're sharing those and other resources here.

• Tone - should be professional, especially since we are disseminating authoritative cultural information
• Reading level and inclusivity - this can vary some depending on your exhibit audience, but generally aim for a fifth-grade reading level. Here are two tools to get you started, although there are many more online: Readability Analyzer and Readable. Another good resource is found at Daily Writing Tips. Readable especially has multiple types of analytics, including one to assess gender balance in your writing.
• Theme - make sure the theme or thesis of your exhibit is present and coherent throughout each page
• Balance - the Chicago Collections exhibits exist to promote collaborative scholarship - to this end we suggest you think about a balance of text and images, as well as a balance of different institutions
• Scholarship - the public places their trust in libraries, archives, and museums, and we encourage you to use a variety of academic and primary sources for any background research you need to do, and cite those sources in a page that is accessible.
• Style guide - if you have a particular style guide with which you are already familiar, we suggest adhering to that (we would recommend the AP Stylebook or the Chicago Manual of Style). Some other great free resources include Strunk and White's Elements of Style on Bartleby and the National Geographic Style Manual.
• Content - your exhibit is largely up to you! But we do suggest that you utilize a title page, an introduction page, and a bibliography/sources page to set up and provide context for your information. Above, we have linked to examples from the Sports exhibit here, but note that the depth and length of your pages will depend on your individual exhibit.
• Captions - keep in mind that your captions for single pieces of media are drawn from the title and/or the description (you can choose to display one or both). Captions for multi-part pieces of media, like carousels, are customizable, but we recommend sticking closely to titles and/or descriptions and also linking to the individual pieces of media so that your users can view all the archival metadata associated with each image. For an example of a multi-part image caption, see the Frances Willard carousel.

There are many other great resources and examples online, like the National Archives list of online exhibitions and the Gould Library exhibition planning guide. Please share any resources you find helpful in our Slack channel.