New features available for Spotlight at Stanford

The Digital Library Systems and Services Access and Discovery Team completed a multi-week development work cycle for Spotlight at Stanford on 7 April 2021. The work cycle focused on continuing the enhancement and support of the Spotlight at Stanford platform to ensure the greatest possible flexibility of use, and to meet the growing needs of the Stanford community and our partners.

We're pleased to highlight the following new features, which were identified as number one priorities by Stanford Libraries stakeholders:

• Significant exhibit creator timesavers
• Added a bulk actions feature for exhibit creators, which includes the ability to remove item tags, alongside the ability to manage item visibility and add item tags. Items are identified for bulk actions by performing a search in an exhibit.
• Added a bulk updates feature for exhibit creators, which provides the ability to add and remove tags, and change item visibility. However, bulk updates uses a different mechanism from bulk actions, instead relying on the download, modification, and upload of a CSV file of items in an exhibit. Items are identified on the CSV by druid, and optionally by title as well.
• Added the ability to bulk rename a tag.
• Significant user-facing benefits
• Exhibit creators can now set up and configure browse groups for their digital exhibits, as announced in this blog post. Browse groups is an optional feature that can be useful when an exhibit has a large number of browse categories that would be easier for an exhibit visitor to discover if they were grouped. 

Additional value was provided to Spotlight by completion of numerous enhancements, including:

• Improved exhibit building
• Added "viewer" role to streamline exhibit-building collaborations
• Fixed a problem preventing selected IIIF items from being uploaded to exhibits
• Fixed bugs related to exhibit-building issues
• Added two new documentation pages for exhibit creators: IIIF Introduction and IIIF in Spotlight FAQs
• Improved user experience
• Enhanced image viewing/zoom for selected widgets
• Ensured long-term sustainability of Spotlight
• Addressed core maintenance tasks

The Release Note Summaries page contains the full list of Spotlight changes completed during this work cycle.

With exhibit publication currently numbering 120, adoption continues to grow and we remain committed to the evolution and sustainability of Spotlight at Stanford as a primary platform to create digital showcases for teaching and research. 

Major kudos to the DLSS Access and Discovery Team for completing this important Spotlight development work, particularly for the professionalism and dedication they displayed during a time of significant staffing changes: Chris Beer, Ilya Benjamin, Gary Geisler, Jessie Keck, M.A. Matienzo, Jack Reed, and Camille Villa.