DCX Overview

Digital Commons Exhibits (DCX) is designed to present your institution’s best works and digital stories in a flexible, modern showcase that can reach a wide range of audiences.

DCX allows you to create two kinds of exhibits: standard exhibits that easily integrate content from your Digital Commons site into an eye-catching collection and scrolling exhibits that provide a dynamic, visual narrative for visitors.

Curation tools in DCX help to highlight your best and most important scholarship with a museum-like design to effectively communicate the prestige of your institution. Archives and special collections appear in their best light, while research projects benefit from a visually inviting gateway to attract students and faculty.

DCX features include:

• Responsive design for viewing across devices
• Easy customization of landing, exhibit, and item pages
• Direct import of records (all file types) to standard exhibits from DC collections, with downloading of files from original DC record
• PDF viewers and image pan/zoom
• Ability to add sections within standard exhibits, and mixing of file types/sources within exhibits and sections
• Compound object display
• Embedded third-party content support for many external sources
• Faceted search, with search snippets and thumbnails
• Custom background color, font, and font color options in standard exhibits
• Metadata display options
• Custom ordering of items
• Custom thumbnails
• Targets the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard

Types of Exhibits You Can Create

All kinds! Try it out for special collections, archives, library exhibits, art shows and portfolios, student works, research collections, teaching and learning materials, journals, or conferences.

DCX is also great for digital humanities projects, labs, grant-funded research artifacts, data collections, or any other collection of content that you’d like to present in a visually appealing display.

In addition to standard exhibits, you also have access to scrolling exhibits with flexible layouts for building single-page narratives for special collections, humanities, and more.

How It Works

Digital Commons Exhibits is integrated with your Digital Commons repository, allowing you to quickly and easily import items from any DC publication into an easy-to-edit exhibit. No need to upload files or enter metadata twice, and download counts stay unified.

Each standard exhibit is customizable and can include a variety of file types combined from different publications to create exhibits around themes, projects, events, or unique collections. You can control the presentation with custom ordering of items and the ability to add text or embeds at the exhibit, section, and item levels.

After a quick, one-time setup of your institution’s DCX site, you will be able to create exhibits and import content from publications in your Digital Commons repository.

The above applies to standard exhibits. Scrolling exhibits make use of text and images that you add directly as well as any previously imported images that you choose.

How To Get Started

Contact your consultant to start using Digital Commons Exhibits. Your consultant will perform a one-time setup and provide you with a login to your institution’s DCX site.

Once you are all set up, review Getting Started with DCX and start creating exhibits, importing content, and fine-tuning your site’s display.