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.”
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/