As a recipient of the DH Certificate Technical Travel Grant, Musa participated in the “Digital Collections and Exhibits with CollectionBuilder” course at DHSI 2025 in Montreal.  This week-long workshop equipped him with practical skills to publish and disseminate research-based digital collections using GitHub, metadata standards, Markdown, and CollectionBuilder’s open-source framework. 

He is currently using CollectionBuilder to create a searchable, filterable, and sustainable digital archive of Ottoman slave market-related documents, including court records, travelogues, and maps. His goal is to create public exhibitions and websites for sharing his digital dataset. He finds that CollectionBuilder enables him to take ownership of his digital project infrastructure without relying heavily on institutional IT support, enabling him to take part in long-term public engagement and digital scholarship in a field where source visibility and interpretation are often limited.