Browse group feature now available for Spotlight at Stanford exhibit creators

We’re pleased to announce the availability of a new Spotlight at Stanford feature. Exhibit creators can now set up and configure browse groups for their digital exhibits. This high priority feature has been requested by Stanford Libraries staff as well as many external Spotlight stakeholders. 

Browse groups is an optional feature that can be useful when your exhibit has a large number of browse categories that would be easier for an exhibit visitor to discover if they were grouped. For example, an exhibit with many items related to an artist’s work may benefit from grouping multiple browse categories by time period, by artistic medium, and by theme. Another example might be an exhibit for a Stanford community group containing a large number of items of different resource types, such as photographs, videos, and publications; by creating a browse group for each of those resource types, the exhibit curator can then assign finer-grained browse categories to each browse group and enable exhibit visitors to more easily explore the types of resources in which they are most interested.

University Archivist Josh Schneider has set up browse groups for the most-recently published exhibit, a collaboration with the Stanford Black Community Services Center entitled Black @ Stanford. The new browse group feature is also being used by the Digital Library of the Middle East, Stanford Libraries’ partnership with the Council on Library and Information Resources and Qatar National Library.

As described in the newly provided Exhibit Documentation page, Browse groups contains the information exhibit administrators and curators need to set up groups. Please consider taking advantage of this new feature to better guide users on their discovery path within your exhibit(s).

The Digital Library Systems and Services Access and Discovery Team is currently working on Spotlight at Stanford. Please stay tuned to updates as the work progresses; we will have other high priority improvements to announce. Updates are sent to the dlss-all-plus email list, and also posted as Release Note Summaries; documentation which is available to the Stanford community and general public.