Spotlight on Spotlight

spotlight

Do you have content in blacklight? Do you have content in other silos? Would you like to create dynamic exhibits and/or collections?  Would you like to manage content, display, search, and facets in a highly configurable online interface?  If you answered yes to any of this, welcome to Spotlight!

“Spotlight is open source software that enables librarians, curators, and other content experts to easily build feature-rich websites that showcase collections and objects from a digital repository, uploaded items, or a combination of the two. Spotlight is a plug-in for Blacklight, an open source, Ruby on Rails Engine that provides a basic discovery interface for searching an Apache Solr index.”

Exhibit page content can be directly tweaked from the browser.
Exhibit page content can be directly tweaked from the browser.

On August 9th and 10th the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and Yale Library hosted the event “Spotlight on Spotlight”.  We were pleased to have members of the Spotlight team here to give a full demonstration, Q&A, and developer unconference.  Stu Snydman, Gary Geisler, and Chris Beer from Stanford, and Trey Pendragon from Princeton lead the sessions. The main demonstration Tuesday morning included a brief history, a review of the initial use cases, context surrounding the platform, and walk throughs of the application and its features. In the afternoon the Q&A session provided a further chance to answer questions collected from the morning presentation and a live conversation. On Wednesday developers stood up individual instances of the application, exercised its extensibility using the DPLA API to import content, and held further technical discussion. After attending the event Steve Weida, Yale Library Webmaster commented, “Spotlight is exciting technology and has matured at a very impressive pace. Along with our commitment to Omeka, Spotlight could play a key role in the future of the Library’s web presence.”

A full recording of the demonstration is available here:
http://britishart.yale.edu/multimedia-video/27/3681

Project website with codebase and further links:
https://github.com/projectblacklight/spotlight

Event wiki:
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Spotlight%20on%20Spotlight%20at%20Yale

DPLA API:
https://dp.la/info/developers/codex/

LIT and partners Tech Talk | Wednesday July 20th 2016

On Wednesday July 20th, from 3pm-4pm in Bass L01, join Library IT and partners in our monthly discussion of tech-related projects around the Library and beyond.

Our agenda includes:

  • Avalon for Music Library (Cindy Greenspun and Jonathan Manton)
  • Desktop video conferencing pilot (Beatrice Richardson)
  • Quicksearch enhancements, integrations, upgrades (Kalee Sprague)
  • LIT service overview documentation (Ray Frohlich)

For those who cannot join us in person, the session will be streamed via Adobe Connect:

http://greet.yale.edu/littechtalk/ [sign in as a guest]

Slides and recordings of the Tech Talk sessions will be archived in https://yale.box.com/LITTechTalkArchives 

See you there!

Library IT cross-training Internship comes to a close

Jason Eiseman, Head of Technology at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, recently completed a cross-training Internship with Library IT.

The two-part focus of the internship was to learn more about the Quicksearch project, and more about how Library IT does its work in general.

The cross-training experience was a great success. 

Jason worked on making a number of links in Quicksearch open in new windows, updated a MARC analysis spreadsheet and improved MARC tag mapping in Quicksearch, and assisted in checking and enhancing some of the Quicksearch documentation.  Most importantly, he  developed a new Rails app that improved the connection between Quicksearch and the law library’s MORRIS catalog.

If you would like more information, Jason will be doing a presentation on his internship at the Tech Talk on August 17th.

It was a pleasure for all of us to work with Jason, and we look forward to collaborating with him in the future!

Service interruption for several library systems – possibly network related

UPDATE:

You may have seen an email from Len Peters just now, reporting that the campus network issues are resolved. Library IT can confirm that some Library services are still experiencing a disruption. This includes but is not necessarily limited to Orbis and Findit. Now that email is working more reliably, we will notify Yulib with updates as we receive them.

 

A note: when campus email services are disrupted, Library IT will continue to communicate service updates on our blog (campuspress.yale.edu/libraryitnews), our Twitter account (@yalelibraryIT) and in some instances, with a notice on the library front door (library.yale.edu). Please check these places for updates if email is not working or slow.

 

You can also check systems statuses at the Library here: http://status.library.yale.edu/

 

and at central ITS here: http://its.yale.edu/system-status

 

Thank you for your patience and for reporting all the outages!

 

ORIGINAL POST:

Several Yale Library services, as well as some campus-wide services, have been interrupted since yesterday afternoon. ITS is investigating these issues. It is possible that campus network problems may be the root cause.

Some of the affected services include but are not limited to:

  • email, including mailman listservs and alias emails
  • Voyager/Orbis
  • Findit

Library IT is actively monitoring this situation and will supply updates as we receive them. ITS has informed Library IT that a Yale alert will go out about these issues shortly. Please check this site, as well as the LIT Twitter account (@yalelibraryIT) for more updates. There will also be a notice posted to the front door.

Thank you for your patience as ITS works to resolve this issue.

Findit Integration in Quicksearch

The Quicksearch Implementation Team, working with a number of staff in Library IT, is beginning the integration of Findit in Quicksearch!  Two groups of stakeholders will initially vet plans for the integration of Findit – an ad-hoc group of Findit stakeholders, and the User Experience Advisory Group.  The integration of Findit will be based on queries against the Findit solr index.  Findit results will appear in Quicksearch in their own bento box, tentatively labeled “Digital Collections”.  An intermediary search results page will allow users to narrow their search using facets.  When a user clicks on an individual digital object title, they will go to the object page in the native Findit interface.   They can then use bread crumbs, full text searching, and other features that are native to Findit.  As has been the case with Orbis, Morris, and Articles+, the native Findit interface will still be available from the Library Front Door.  The project is estimated for completion in mid-late April.  A round of user studies will shortly follow the production implementation.

 

Quicksearch Live on the Library Front Door

Quicksearch is now the default search on the Library Front Door!

The unified search and discovery tool is now available as part of a new search box re-design at http://web.library.yale.edu.  Although Quicksearch is the default search, links to Orbis, Morris, and Articles+ are still prominent on the page.

In addition to going live on the Front Door, Quicksearch has an exciting new feature.  It is now possible to place Orbis, Morris, Scan and Deliver, and Aeon requests directly within the Quicksearch interface!  Request links for these individual services are available below the holdings location and call number information in individual title pages.  For an example, see http://search.library.yale.edu/catalog/8518891.

The roll out of Quicksearch on the front door represents a major milestone in the Quicksearch project.  Many thanks to everyone who has participated in the project to date, as part of a task force, testing group, implementation team, or by providing comments and feedback!

 

Quicksearch Update November 2015

The Quicksearch implementation team has been busy this fall with two major projects.

The first project was to improve the indexing of Morris and Orbis records. Work began with the Books+ Search Analysis Working Group, a broad-based team of technical services stakeholders, led by Quicksearch team member Arcadia Falcone.  The group wrote a recommendation document highlighting changes to searching, faceting, and sorting in Quicksearch.  The changes were then reviewed by the Cataloging Coordinating Committee and the User Experience Advisory Committee.  The approved recommendations were then implemented by Quicksearch team members in a series of code updates and a full extract and re-load of over 10.3 million Morris and Orbis records.  A new Subject (Local Yale) facet is just one of the recommended changes now available in Quicksearch.  A few recommended changes related to facet and sort labels are still in progress and will be available in production Quicksearch within the next week.

This fall the team has also been busy improving the layout, design, and content of holdings in the Quicksearch single item view.  A new streamlined design was introduced to Quicksearch earlier in the fall, with improved indentation designed to make it easier to see individual holdings for items with numerous holdings statements.  Holdings notes relating to the Provenance and description of individual special collections items were also added to the holdings display.  Finally, the mobile view of holdings has been revised, and is continuing to undergo review.

Currently on the development front – the team has now embarked on the project to implement Aeon and Scan and Deliver requests in Quicksearch.  In addition to adding new request types, we will re-design the request links in the item view, making the options to request from Orbis, Morris, Scan and Deliver or Aeon, easier to find and use for our patrons.  We hope to make all of these request types available in time for our January roll-out of Quicksearch.

 

Completion of Kissinger Ingest

In October we completed the ingest of digitized materials for the Henry Kissinger project into Hydra and as a result, checked off a major milestone for the project. Ingest began in September 2014 and overall took 249 days to complete where for many weeks the ingest process was running 24/7 and required close monitoring.

The ingest process involved first creating metadata records in Ladybird from the original EAD files for the Kissinger collection (MS 1981 and MS 2004). This amounted to 16,161 Ladybird objects. Then as each of the 85 hard drives returned from the vendor, each drive had its contents validated through an automated quality control process and then transferred to temporary, network accessible storage for a manual quality control process. Once the digital files passed the quality control phase, they were matched up with the Ladybird object to create the complex parent/child relationship, essentially combining the metadata record with the digital files. This was performed by using the file name from each TIF image and extracting parts of the name to match it to the Ladybird record. Once a match was made, we imported the TIF and associated OCR file into Ladybird to create the ingest package to send to Hydra. Each ingest package contained the original TIF image, OCR file, a derivative JP2 and a derivative JPG. In addition, five metadata files were also attached which make up the Hydra object.

After completing ingest into Hydra, we then performed two independent audits to confirm the quantities of files matched correctly and each file’s checksum matched the original checksum in addition to the checksums calculated along the way to ensure file integrity.

Combining the counts of files for both MS 1981 and MS 2004, this is the end result:

Total Folders 16,161
Folders with digitized content 15,710
PDF files 15,710
Folders containing Audio/Video 157
Total TIF Images 1,530,433
Total OCR Files 1,202,920
Total Ladybird objects 1,546,594
Total Files Ingested into Hydra 13,542,899
Approximate checksums calculated 39,268,398
Estimated size of collection 95 Terabytes

 

The following chart illustrates the growth by month from September 2014 through October 2015.

Kissinger Ingest Graph

YUL gets an updated interface for digital collections search and discovery

On Monday 9/21/2015, YUL’s digital collection discovery interface (findit.library.yale.edu) will go live with a new design modeled on the Quicksearch interface design. These coordinating designs let our users know that they are in the same Yale University Library web space and should expect similar functionality.

The new look and feel of digital collections search at YUL- main page (click the image to get a larger view):

Digital Collections Search look and feel

 

Search results in the new design:

Digital Collections Search look and feel - search results

 

There will also be a few new features in the digital collections search added on Monday. These include:

 

  • an Access Restrictions facet, to limit by either open or restricted accessNew feature: Access facet
  • a Repository facet, to limit to and search within a specific repository at YUL

New feature added: Repository facet

  • a Call Number facet, to limit to and search within call numbers assigned to items

New feature: call number facet

 

Another feature coming soon (but not on Monday) is a date slider with a histogram visualization, which gives users the ability to limit by date range and see the frequency of hits in a given year. To see an example of a feature like this used elsewhere, click on this search of Articles+ and look to the lower left to see the date range and histogram.

Coming soon: date range

 

As always, your feedback is welcomed and appreciated. Please use the feedback link on the bottom center of the digital collections search page (or just click here), and tell us your thoughts!

MORRIS HOLDINGS NOW AVAILABLE IN QUICKSEARCH!

Morris holdings now appear in Quicksearch!

The best way to view this new feature is to search for a law-related topic like ‘Human Rights Law’ in Quicksearch, http://search.library.yale.edu.

In the Search Results list you will now see real-time availability information.    A red ‘x’ appears if the title is checked out, and a green check mark displays if the title is available.

morris_search_results.fw

In the individual holdings screen, you can see the location, call number, and status of the title pulled directly in real time from Morris.

morris_title_holdings.fw

This is an important milestone in the Quicksearch project ;  the two Yale Library catalogs, Orbis and Morris, are both now fully represented in Quicksearch.