The Stanford University Libraries (SUL) is pleased to announce the release of Spotlight, an innovative solution that enables libraries and other cultural heritage institutions to build online exhibits from content in their repositories to better highlight their digital collections.
by Stu Snydman & Gary Geisler
The Stanford University Libraries (SUL) have a rich and diverse collection of digital content. Users can discover collections and content from the Stanford Digital Repository through the library website, library catalog (SearchWorks), and persistent citation (PURL) pages. SUL also develops robust, custom-built websites for selected collections (see Parker on the Web and the French Revolution Digital Archive) that provide a rich discovery environment and a range of features that enable users to more effectively work with the collection items. But these sites require significant investment in time and development resources to produce and maintain, limiting the number and variety SUL can support.
Creating a last minute gift and you need that perfect photo? Search Flickr Creative Commons portal, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online, Clip Art, and stock photos sites through the University of Washington's Images libguide.
SUL’s Special Collections received an Innovation Grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to develop a software program (ePADD) for processing and making email archives discoverable. The end goal is to produce an open-source tool that will allow repositories and individuals to interact with email archives before and after they have been transferred to a repository. It would consist of four modules, each based on a different functional activity: Processing (arrangement and description), Appraisal (collection development), Discovery (online via the web), and Delivery (access).
The project website was launched in August 2013 and lists: project goals, work plan, team, and collaborators. A twitter feed for the project was just launched although project updates and news will primarily be posted in Special Collections Unbound.
Since its inception in the early 1970s, email has become a durable form of communication – one that presents a massive problem for donors, repositories, and researchers. Over 140 billion email messages are sent every day, and many, if not all have research value as part of an archival collection. Email is used for more than just communication. It is used for collaboration, planning, sharing, conducting transactions, and as an aid to memory – a self-archive. It documents relationships – personal, business, and communal. Our reliance on and daily use of email over the past 40 years has developed rich archival material with a secondary benefit of recording social networks in the header information of senders and recipients.
The Department of Special Collections at SUL proposes to address important facets of stewarding email archives that have not been tackled in previous projects. Characteristics of email such as its relatively stable format standardization as well as the inherent structure itself – header, body, attachments – make email an ideal candidate for automated tools to support archival workflows, such as appraisal and processing, as well as benefitting the user through discovery and delivery.
Last week Stanford open sourced the code responsible for the Nearby on Shelf feature in SearchWorks as the Blacklight Browse Nearby gem. This feature has been highly sought after by various Blacklight institutions to be contributed back to the community. In keeping with the spirit of the vibrant open source community around Blacklight, Stanford has contributed the development effort to get this codebase available for use and contribution by other Blacklight implementers.
The release of this software was the culmination of a re-write of the SearchWorks code making it an installable package, more generalizable, and suitable in an open source context. Due to that fact, the end product is much more generic that SearchWorks' version (as you can see in the side-by-side screenshots below with SearchWorks being on the right) however it is infinitely more customizable.
The Stanford University Libraries recently launched a redesign of its main library website at http://library.stanford.edu. This is a Drupal 7-based site hosted on Pantheon.
In the future we hope to document more thoroughly the technical approaches we took on several bits of the site, but for now I'll summarize a few of the features this community might be interested with a brief summary of the technical approach taken for each. In no particular order:
The International Image Interoperability Framework (http://lib.stanford.edu/iiif) is an initiative driven by several major research and national libraries to enable the rich and robust delivery of digital images through common interfaces, and to spur the development of open source and commercial software solutions in this space.
The IIIF Working Group invites comment and feedback on a proposed API for the the delivery of images via a standard http request. The full specification can be found at:
http://library.stanford.edu/iiif/image-api
The IIIF Image API specifies a web service that returns an image in response to a standard http or https request. The URL can specify the region, size, rotation, quality characteristics and format of the requested image. A URL can also be constructed to request basic technical information about the image to support client applications.