Hi All,
CB-Essay<https://collectionbuilder.github.io/cb-essay/> is a static web framework for long-form digital scholarship, built especially for publishing essays, monographs, and annotated editions. Built on CollectionBuilder, it enables you to create multimodal narratives that integrate primary sources, archival materials, and multimedia items directly into your texts.
If you've looked at Manifold, Pressbooks, or Scalar and wished for something lighter: CB-Essay covers most of the same ground without a server, a database, or hosting infrastructure. You write in Markdown, your sources live in a CSV, and the whole thing publishes to GitHub Pages for free.
demo: https://collectionbuilder.github.io/cb-essay/
template: https://github.com/CollectionBuilder/cb-essay
Some Features to Note
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A reading experience designed for long-form writing — Edward Tufte-inspired layout and margin notes linked to primary sources, Scrollama section transitions, and inline galleries that open multimedia items without leaving the page.
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Theming options galore, including three built-in homepage layouts, configurable typography, and eight color-and-font themes cribbed from fine-press history (Kelmscott, Doves, Aldine, Nonesuch — thank you to the Lilly Library and Joel Silver for my introductions!).
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A Paged.js print hub<https://collectionbuilder.github.io/cb-essay/print/> that turns the essay source files into properly typeset PDFs.
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A GitHub Action that pulls any of 60,000+ Project Gutenberg texts into your essay folder, pre-split into chapters. Useful for annotated editions, teaching, or just trying the tool out.
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Standard CollectionBuilder pages — Browse, Map, Timeline, Subjects, full-text search, data downloads — sitting alongside your essay.
CB-Essay grew out of graduate thesis projects (Sedimentation<https://cdil.lib.uidaho.edu/sedimentation/>, Tender Spaces<https://cdil.lib.uidaho.edu/tender-spaces/>, Fire Lines<https://cdil.lib.uidaho.edu/fire-lines/>) that needed their authors' writing featured more prominently than the collections informing them. The demo site<https://collectionbuilder.github.io/cb-essay/> is itself a CB-Essay — each section teaches you the features it uses.
Built Ons
CB-Essay is the first of what we're calling CollectionBuilder Built Ons<https://collectionbuilder.github.io/built-ons.html>—frameworks layered on CollectionBuilder-CSV for particular kinds of projects. Our older project Oral History as Data<https://oralhistoryasdata.github.io/> is the second, and that framework is now also fully integrated with CollectionBuilder. We'll have at least one more coming as we finish out our (recently reinstated) IMLS grant this next year.
Questions welcome — reach me directly at dbecker_at_uidaho.edu or the team at collectionbuilder.team_at_gmail.com.
Yrs,
Devin
DEVIN BECKER (he/him)
dbecker_at_uidaho.edu | 208.885.7040
Associate Dean for Research and Instruction
Co-Director, Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning<https://cdil.lib.uidaho.edu> (CD?L)
Project Director, CollectionBuilder<https://collectionbuilder.github.io/>
U of I Libraries
lib.uidaho.edu<https://www.lib.uidaho.edu>
Received on Thu May 28 2026 - 09:41:44 EDT