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/

HydraConnect 2015

Hydra Project
The HydraConnect 2015 conference took place September 21-25 in Minneapolis[1] totaling 200 people from 60 institutions including 2 representatives from Yale, Kalee Sprague and Eric James. The conference was structured with Monday Workshops, a Tuesday morning plenary, a Tuesday afternoon poster session, and sessions, lighting talks, and breakout groups on Thursday and Friday. The project “Hydra” has come to represent an aggregation of components serving the needs of the digital community. Core applications include Blacklight[2] – a discovery index and interface, Sufia[3] – an institutional repository supporting self-upload, Avalon[4] – an application for audio/video materials, Spotlight[5] – an exhibit creation tool, Stanford Earthworks[6] – supporting spatial discovery, and Hydra in a Box[7] – a new project to create a turnkey Hydra application. The main themes of the conference were linked data and interoperability, the approach of defining a content model by fleshing out metadata concerns driven by end user requirements. To this end several initiatives are currently under development centered around The Portland Common Data Model PCDM[8], a construct built on the resource/description/containment spec of the Linked Data Platform[9], providing a generic framework for resource properties and association. A key component of this is the championing of the approach of using dereferenceable URIs[10] in metadata description and tackling the challenges this entails such as enriching current literal description, resolving URIs to its constituent properties, caching fragments of this linked data, and achieving all of this in a platform agnostic way. Complementing this work are several interest and working groups, addressing the specific areas such descriptive/rights/structural metadata, service management, UX design, and archival interests. HydraConnect 2015 is the third conference of its kind and has grown considerably each year with expectations of much development to continue.

[1]https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Hydra+Connect+2015
[2] http://projectblacklight.org/
[3] https://github.com/projecthydra/sufia
[4] http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/resources
[5] https://library.stanford.edu/projects/spotlight
[6]http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/digital-library-blog/2015/04/introducing-earthworks-stanfords-new-gis-data-discovery
[7] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/hydra/Hydra+in+a+Box
[8] https://github.com/duraspace/pcdm/wiki
[9] http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/
[10]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dereferenceable_Uniform_Resource_Identifier

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!

Project update: Digital collections search interface

Central ITS will be conducting the first of three load tests on the enhanced interface for digital collections on Friday July 17th between 1:30pm and 5pm. They will use a service called LoadRunner which determines the breaking point of an application by emulating real use by a number of concurrent users. The second two tests will take place between July 27 and July 30. I will follow up once these dates and times are confirmed.

These tests on the enhanced interface for digital collections are not expected to impact the current digital collections interface. Library IT will be monitoring the current digital collections interface on 7/17 for service disruptions.

I write to you regarding some testing on the enhanced interface for digital collections that may impact our current digital collections discovery service (http://findit.library.yale.edu). The enhanced interface for digital collections is a version of this digital collections discovery service, with features, functionality and security developed for use with more restricted digital materials. Like our unified discovery service,Quicksearch, both the digital collections interface and the enhanced version are powered by Blacklight.
Curious about what’s in the Yale University Library digital collections search? Here’s some clocks made by Paul Revere. We also have fire insurance maps of Seymour, CT– and much more! You can learn more about the Library’s discovery services (Articles+Quicksearch and digital collections search) at the Rediscover Discovery forum in August (Tues 18th and Thurs 20th). More information on that coming soon.

If you have questions about this work, or notice any issues with http://findit.library.yale.edu, please let me know.

 

Mike Friscia

On behalf of the FindIT Project Implementation team:

Osman Din

Eric James

Tracy MacMath

Anju Meenattoor

Bob Rice

Lakeisha Robinson

Steelsen Smith

Kalee Sprague

Yale Joins the IIIF Consortium

On Tuesday [June 16], eleven world-leading institutions agreed to form the IIIF Consortium, a member organization dedicated to sustaining and advancing the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). The consortium will support the work of IIIF by pooling and allocating funding from members for exposing content via IIIF; doing outreach, training, and advocacy to grow the community; maintaining and elaborating on the IIIF technical specifications; providing catalytic support for IIIF-compatible software development; helping coordinate the IIIF community, and more.

[Read more]

From the Hydra News blog: HydraDAM 2 update

posted Fri, 22 May 2015 by Michael Friscia

Indiana University and WGBH recently presented their plans for the grant funded HydraDAM 2 project . Some interesting bullets from their presentation:

HydraDAM 1 came from a need for WGBH to migrate off the vendor product Artesia which was heading in a new direction

Indian University’s use case is to ingest 10 Terabytes per day for 4 years for a total of 6.6 Petabytes of master and use copy video files along with associated files for preservation into HydraDAM 2

HydraDam 1 is too slow for ingest so ingest is handled externally

HydraDam2 will use two different storage system models with Fedora 4 managing both online/nearline and offline tape copies

Out of region copies are out of scope for the size of the collection going in, however, IU is a DPN member and plans to use that for high risk items. Currently they are in the process of setting policies and preservation levels associated with the content.

Preservation services to be offered in HydraDam2 include:

Storage and retrieval of files

Scheduled fixity checks and file characterization on demand

Auditing based on Fedora 4

Reporting

Media migration (from one storage solution to another storage solution)

Format migration for risk of obsolescence

There is a working version of Avalon using Fedora 4

This was a preliminary presentation. IU and WGBH will be giving a detailed presentation at the upcoming Open Repositories conference in June.

DPLA joins the Hydra Partners

We are delighted to announce that the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has become the latest formal Hydra Partner.  In their Letter of Intent Mark Matienzo, DPLA’s Director of Technology, writes of their “upcoming major Hydra project, generously funded by the IMLS, and in partnership with Stanford University and Duraspace, [which] focuses on developing an improved set of tools for content management, publishing, and aggregation for the network of DPLA Hubs. This, and other projects, will allow us to make contributions to other core components of the Hydra stack, including but not limited to Blacklight, ActiveTriples, and support for protocols like IIIF and ResourceSync. We are also interested in continuing to contribute our metadata expertise to the Hydra community to ensure interoperability across our communities.”

IMLS funds collaborative development of “Hydra-in-a-Box”

Digital Public Library of America – Boston, MA

Grant Program: National Leadership Grants

Category: National Digital Platform

Award Amount: $1,999,897; Matching Amount: $2,000,686

 

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Stanford University, and DuraSpace will foster a greatly expanded network of open-access, content-hosting “hubs” that will enable discovery and interoperability, as well as the reuse of digital resources by people from this country and around the world. At the core of this transformative network are advanced digital repositories that not only empower local institutions with new asset management capabilities, but also connect their data and collections. Currently, DPLA’s hubs, libraries, archives, and museums more broadly use aging, legacy software that was never intended or designed for use in an interconnected way, or for contemporary web needs. The three partners will engage in a major development of the community-driven open source Hydra project to provide these hubs with a new all-in-one solution, which will also allow countless other institutions to easily join the national digital platform.

 

http://www.imls.gov/news/2015_lb21_nlg_march_announcement.aspx

 

LDCX 2015

ldcx-250w

Approximately 70 people convened at Lathrop Library on the Stanford University campus to collaborate on the converging goals of the library, archive, and museum community at the 6th annual ldcx 2015 conference. While the schedule was ad-hoc, composed of lighting talks, plenary sessions, topic groups, and informal breakouts, the issues were well rooted in the themes of linked data models, discovery applications, and digital asset management. One of the long standing goals of the community has been bringing together individual and institutional efforts and this was very much manifest at the conference. There was a fruitful balance of sharing past achievement, making ongoing progress and planning for challenges to come. The Hydra stack has made its presence felt in almost every arena. Development is at a stage where best practices and design abstractions are emerging. Implementation of the Linked Data Platform (LDP), and the Portland Commons Data Model (PCDM) holds much promise as foundations of the future. Surprisingly there was very little coverage of Digital Preservation, but perhaps this a potential vacuum to be filled later. While is difficult to give adequate attention to everything covered, for more please check out:

Projecthydra
Spotlight
Geoblacklight
Arclight and next-gen archives
Mirador
Linked Data Platform
Portland Commons Data Model
IIIF Image and Presentation Specification
Sufia
Fedora 4
Avalon

More Hydra Ingest Statistics

More on the Hydra ingest workflow from Library IT and MSSA:

Enterprise Systems and Services in Library IT and MSSA staff also do preparation work on files prior to ingest into the Hydra digital repository.

ESS runs ingest and digital QC of files, and MSSA runs visual QC as well as sorting printed copies of Yale and LC call numbers.

So far we have collected 2,884,363 files in 48,743 folders and the files are currently stored on disk totaling 49 TB.