RESOURCE: A Draft Style Guide for Digital Collection Hypertexts

Trevor Owens (Library of Congress) offers a draft style guide for online collections that will be particularly useful for those responsible for creating and curating digital content (such as exhibits built in Omeka). Owens seeks to “take the ideas of exhibition and print publications that make extensive use of deep captions and figure out how they fit into the way the web writing works and people engage with the web.” He discusses nine central ideas:

1. Every narrative page stands on its own
2. Every caption should explicate/interpret the image/object presented
3. Object captions should always stand on their own
4. A new heading should break up text after every few paragraphs
5. An image from an item should always be visible as one scrolls through the page
6. Each page should be in the long blog post sweet spot–700-2000 words
7. Hyperlink text for connections and emphasis
8. Links should connect consistently connect out across subsections
9. Show parts of items, link out to whole items