Discovery and discoverability for Spotlight at Stanford exhibits

New features available for Spotlight at Stanford

In early March 2020, an engineering team from Digital Library Systems and Services concluded a 2-month work cycle to make significant improvements to Spotlight at Stanford, our platform that supports digital showcases for research and teaching — also known as “exhibits.” As requested and highly prioritized by Stanford Libraries’ curators, bibliographers and other exhibit creators, we released new features that enhance both discoverability and discovery for exhibits. The new features are described in detail, below.

SIncere thanks to the team: Chris Beer, Gary Geisler, Jessie Keck, Mark Matienzo, Jack Reed, Jennifer Vine and Camille Villa.

Discoverability for items in exhibits via SearchWorks

• When an item in an exhibit has an item record in SearchWorks, there is now a block on the left-hand side of the SW item record page indicating the item is featured in an exhibit, with a direct link to the item in the exhibit. If the item is in multiple exhibits, they will all appear in the block, each with a link to the item in that exhibit. Check out this example item record, where you will discover that the image is featured in four Spotlight at Stanford exhibits: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/sv790jp2631.

• When viewing a collection record in SearchWorks, if any item in the collection is featured in an exhibit (and often there would be multiple items, of course), there is now a block on the left-hand side of the SW collection record page indicating that an item (or items) in the collection is featured in an exhibit, with a direct link to the exhibit. If there are item(s) in multiple exhibits, they  will all appear in the block, with a link to each exhibit. Check out this example collection record, where you will discover that one or more images from the Stanford Historical Photograph Collection are featured in 22 Spotlight at Stanford exhibits: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/4769498.

• Users can search item metadata across all exhibits to locate items. The search box is available on the home page (exhibits.stanford.edu), located on the left-hand side of the masthead. 

• Search includes metadata for exhibit items that were added from the Stanford Digital Repository, as a IIIF resource, or as a non-SDR item. After executing a search, users can limit their search by category, title, or date range; group results by exhibit; sort by relevance; and display results in either list or gallery view. Please note: search across is searching content (images, audio, video) and its associated metadata, but not exhibit-specific text provided by the exhibit creator. Try out a search for – mining – as you see below.