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Tools for Digital Scholarship at UW

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​The UW Libraries offers faculty and graduate students a range of tools and platforms for digital scholarship and pedagogy. These tools offer robust and flexible technologies for doing digital scholarship without the barriers of installing software, managing technology infrastructure, or relying on limited "free" versions. Tools included in this service include full Omeka, Wordpress, Pressbooks, Manifold, and more. We invite you to explore the potential of digital scholarship tools to transform your research and instruction.

Please contact Denise Hattwig, Head of Digital Scholarship, to learn more, or get started by logging in to the Digital Scholarship Platforms site.

Omeka

Omeka is a robust web publishing platform for the display of scholarly exhibits and collections. Omeka is structured with ready-to-go templates, themes, and plug-ins that allow users to create polished, media-rich online projects without coding or extensive configurations. Omeka is idea for creating digital exhibits with appealing layout and presentation options with accompanying text-based scholarship. Omeka is available through the UW Librares' Digital Scholarship Platforms service.

Use Omeka if you want to:

  • Create curated online exhibits of images and media with accompanying scholarly framing and arguments
  • Develop theme-based digital collections that support scholarly work
  • Publish open, media-rich scholarly content using well-designed templates

Pressbooks

Pressbooks is an easy-to-use book production software for open, online chapter-based publications. Pressbooks is used by educational institutions around the world as well as authors and publishers, and is a first choice for publishing and sharing OER (Open Educational Resources) content that can be adapted and reused. See examples of UW Pressbooks projects on the UW Libraries Pressbooks Publishing Platform.

Use Pressbooks if you want to:

  • Create an open, online publication
  • Openly publish a scholarly monograph, textbooks, fiction and non-fiction books, syllabi and assignments, zines, and more
  • Publish and share OER (Open Educational Resources)
  • Adapt and reuse OER published by others 
  • Export your online book to MOBI (for Kindle ebooks), EPUB (for all other ebookstores), PDF (for print-on-demand and digital distribution)

Wordpress

Wordpress is a personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. Wordpress is ideal for multi-faceted digital scholarship projects that require flexibility and extensibility. The over 10,000 plugins available for Wordpress can help you organize and display your scholarly content in endless ways. Wordpress is available through the UW Librares' Digital Scholarship Platforms service.

Use Wordpress if you:

  • Envision a scholarly project that includes multiple types of content and layout
  • Plan to combine long-form text, static and dynamic pages, image exhibits, embedded video, links to other sites, etc.
  • Need a comprehensive website package for multiple scholarly uses

If you need a site for blogging only, please use UW IT's "UW Sites" Wordpress blogging service.

Manifold

Manifold is a digital book publishing platform that allows you to upload multiple texts and embed interactive media elements into texts. Manifold is ideal for publishing completed text-based scholarship, and for uploading public-domain text for commentary using built-in annotation features. See the Manifold at the University of Washington site for examples of UW uses of Manifold.​