After closing its spring 2025 exhibition “Before They Were Famous: The Student Days of the Class of 1825,” Hawthorne-Longfellow Library has transformed the show in digital form through a collaboration with Information Technology.

Through the Omeka-S publishing platform, online visitors can now virtually explore the stories and objects from the Department of Special Collections and Archives, browsing through tabs organized based on the cases the library previously had on display.

The exhibition highlights objects and stories from the Class of 1825, the celebrated class of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in honor of its 200th anniversary.

Director of Special Collections and Archives Kat Stefko, who curated the exhibition, was inspired to dig deeper into the Class of 1825 as the Class of 2025 first arrived on campus.

“Every morning on my way in and out of the library, [I would see] the portraits of Hawthorne and Longfellow and wonder what they were like as students…. I started digging into the historical records, trying to understand what college was like at the time, wanting to somehow honor the anniversary,” Stefko said.

Stefko also wanted to delve into the untold history of Hawthorne and Longfellow’s time at Bowdoin.

“[Digging into the library’s materials,] it became pretty clear that each of [graduates] were unique and interesting in their own way, and it became an opportunity to really highlight different aspects of what it was like before they were famous by way of academics, where they lived, literary societies and how they engaged outside of academics …  to tell a story about Hawthorne and Longfellow that had really never been told,” she continued.

After receiving positive feedback on the celebratory exhibition, Stefko was determined to uphold the experience even as the exhibition closed. She began collaborating with Carr Ross, the now-retired web technologies librarian, and Mike McDermott, the digital technology integration librarian, early on in the process.

“There are biographies of each class member  that were on our original digital exhibit platform. It became clear that we wanted to somehow preserve the look and feel and the experience of the physical exhibit itself. That’s something we hadn’t actually done for any other exhibit,” Stefko said. “Right around the time we were realizing our current platform, which was WordPress, was aging out, we were also thinking about where we wanted to take online exhibits going forward. So, [McDermott and Ross] did a lot of the early work to experiment, to see what was feasible. After testing many, many times, we decided, ‘It’s a go.’”

Transitioning from WordPress, the team selected Omeka-S as their preferred platform.

“I think one of the strengths of Omeka is that it’s very much based around the concept of an item and describing that item and making consistent ways to view different members of an item set…. Omeka is very structured, and the structure has to be there before you start putting stuff together. So it’s a little bit backwards from what we had normally done, but it’s much more suited to archival materials like this,” McDermott said. “You get the full overview as soon as you log on to the website, and that way you can really pick the section you’re most interested in.”

Stefko highlighted that the digital format now provides new tools for exhibition visitors.

“When I’m preparing an exhibit, I’m searching my soul to figure out which page of a book to actually have on view. [Omeka] allows us to put a whole digitized book online, so the virtual visitor can pace through the entire object, adding something we’re not able to do in the physical exhibit itself. That’s one of the extensions I really like,” Stefko said.

The virtual exhibition also helps visitors to access information more easily, according to McDermott.

“[The digital format is] almost an instant backup. When you go home and you remember something, you can go back to the online site and reexamine it and get more detail,” he said.

Having found real benefits in the new platform, Stefko and McDermott see Omeka continuing to be a staple for any display needs.

“This is a need that pretty much all museums and special collections have: [some type] of more interactive online experience. I think we’re going to have more colleagues to work with on this going forward,” Stefko said.