Spotlight: A Blacklight Plugin for Showcasing Digital Collections

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

General Track Papers and Panels

The session was recorded and is <a href="https://connectpro.helsinki.fi/p1yw6wcu7y4/">available for watching</a> (this presentation starts at 0:25:10)

Like many institutions, the Stanford University Libraries (SUL) have a rich and diverse collection of content in its digital repository. While this repository content is accessible through an integrated discovery environment, librarians, curators, and collection donors often want to showcase individual collections, and faculty, students, and researchers want to work with these collections in more focused, feature­rich environment that supports their scholarly goals. Purpose­built websites can satisfy these goals, but the time and development resources required to create a robust collection­specific website limits how often an institution can commit to producing them. To address this problem, SUL has developed an digital collections plugin for Blacklight, called Spotlight, designed to showcase heterogenous content from within a repository or other data store. Combined with Blacklight, an institution can use Spotlight to establish a self­service environment in which librarians, curators, faculty, and others can easily create attractive, feature­rich websites that showcase repository content of their choosing.