Design: Initial Design
The initial design process for Spotlight was conducted by the Digital Library Systems and Services group at Stanford University in the summer of 2013. Preliminary design documents were discussed with the community at the Hydra Partners meeting in September 2013 at State College, PA. Refined Spotlight design documents were more formally presented and discussed with the Hydra/Blacklight community at the January, 2014 Hydra Partners meeting in San Diego.
Below are examples from the original Spotlight design documents. The original design documents are available in their entirety as part of this repository.
Stanford University Libraries
- Raise awareness of and promote Stanford collections
- Complement physical exhibitions and special events
- Provide means to further the education and research objectives of: a) those who make exhibits, b) those who visit exhibits
SUL DLSS
- Empower librarians, archivists, and other curators by providing a self-service tool for creating online exhibits
- Clarify the SUL collection/exhibits space and the options for publicizing and providing access to collections
- Sunset legacy collection sites through migration and avoid future resource investment in legacy sites
- Integrate exhibit content with SDR metadata and services
- Enhance the Blacklight ecosystem with new capabilities that will attract more BL adopters and contributors
- Actively contribute to the OSS/library community
- Demonstrate ability to design and produce high-quality, useful digital library products
 Must Have
- Social bookmarking/sharing links to exhibit
- RSS feed for exhibit updates
- Easy navigation to different exhibit sections/topic areas
- Space for branding of donors
- About pages - exhibit information, related resources, publicity
- Item call numbers
- Link item to SearchWorks and/or PURL record
- Link to source collection(s) of exhibit in SearchWorks
- Pre-formatted citations
- Social bookmarking/sharing links to item
- View high-resolution image/map with zoom and pan
- Download high-resolution image/map
- Download map images in geo formats (KML, GEOTIF)
- Search box
- Search/browse limited by exhibit-specific facets
- Results page views: list, gallery, slideshow
- Browse items by curated themes
- Report a problem link/form
- Stanford footer links
Should Have
- Results page views: map
- Site responsiveness (optimized display for mobile devices)
- Browse items by exhibit section
- Item location in physical exhibition
- Save items to user workspace (session-based item drop area)
- View saved items
- Side-by-side item viewing (from items in user workspace) - Item tagging
- Item favoriting
Nice to Have
- Discussion forums
- Advanced search: narrow by fields; by type, user, collection, tags, geo
- Related item discovery
- SUNet auto-login
- External (non-SUNet) user registration/sign in
- User profile with bio, activity history
- Item commenting
- Image annotation
- Transcription widget - enable users to transcribe items - User-generated gallery
- User-generated slideshow
- Embed code - enable embedding item content as an iframe in other sites
Must Have
- Exhibit settings: title, description, creator(s), etc.
- Appearance: select from multiple visual themes
- Allow minimal (just basic information with no imported items) to full-featured exhibit
- Choose to feature an item/collection/widget on homepage
- Define distinct exhibit ‘curated feature pages’ with titles and introduction text (hierarchical tree of sections)
- Define arbitrary number of About pages (hierarchical tree of pages)
- Flexibility in populating pages (add arbitrary widgets to pages, including ImageViewer, Flipbook, etc.)
- Choice of page layout for customized pages, in terms of full- width pages versus pages with sidebars
- Flexible text editing - HTML option, text-wrapping options, image captions, etc.
- Report a problem/contact form
- Assign SDR/SearchWorks items to exhibit sections
- Assign exhibit items to thematic groupings that end-users can use to browse items
Should Have
- Option to include map view of results
- User management (delete users, change user role)
- Analytics - easy configuration and viewing of Google Analytics
- Site security (editing and uploading): specify allowed file types, HTML elements and attributes
- Visual page layout (i.e., drag-and-drop page sections or widgets)
- Limit access to an included widget to SUNet users
- Some form of digital representation of physical exhibition, with links between items and exhibition representation
- Hide selected metadata elements
- Add geo-location info to items
- Add code to display embedded Google Map
Nice to Have
- CSV import - Imports items, tags, etc. from CSV file
- Add Wikipedia citation code to item or collection
- Link checking - automated link checking reports
- Add form for user to sign up to mailing list, including selection of areas of interest