Exhibits Site

CURIOSity Digital Collections 

Who's Who Data

  • Institution
  • Who are the lead contact(s) this community can reach out to for questions?
    • Vanessa Venti, Service Manager and Product Owner (vanessa_venti at harvard dot edu)
  • How long have you been using Spotlight?
    • Since 2017
  • How many people are on your Spotlight team?
    • The team size varies depending on the work cycle.
  • List or number of published Spotlight exhibits
    • ~70
  • Have you used other digital collections platforms at your institution such as Omeka? If so, do you maintain more than one digital collection platform?

    • Spotlight is our primary centrally supported digital collections platform. Occasionally we recommend creating a LibGuide or Drupal site if Spotlight is not the right fit for a project.

    • Before Spotlight, our primary centrally supported system was a homegrown platform that hosted 19 collections, all of which we have since migrated to Spotlight. We’ve also migrated many other custom sites over the years, including a few Omeka sites originally created as part of a pilot.

  • Have you used Spotlight to migrate older digital collections? If so, what were the lessons learned?

      • Yes—see above. Migrating older collections is substantial work but it's worth the effort to avoid maintaining separate custom sites. Spotlight supports the core features required for most migrations, though migrated sites will often lose some of their original custom functionality.

  • What Spotlight features do you use?
    • All
  • What features would you like the community to develop or plan to develop yourself? (Gathered here so this community can help developers across institutions with coordination)
    • Cross-site search: Search across all site titles and descriptions

    • Image size options: Choose small, medium, or large image display sizes

    • Rich captions: Add hyperlinks and line breaks in widget captions for more expressive descriptions

    • Feature & About Page navigation: Add Next/Previous buttons at the bottom of long pages (or make the side navigation sticky) to improve navigation without scrolling back to the top.

    • Curator tag search: Make curator-assigned tags searchable

    • Pages widget upgrade: Allow Browse page and Browse Categories to be added within the widget

    • Faceted browse: Add filters to browse pages to help users narrow down results

    • Enhanced browse layout: Allow descriptive text or paragraphs to be added to Browse page

  • What are your biggest barriers to using or expanding Spotlight use at your institution?

    • Our metadata hub, LibraryCloud, needs maintenance and likely a rebuild. The risk assessment process can also be complex and time-consuming depending on the collection.

Notable Exhibits

Demo

For the April 2019 Spotlight Service Community Call, Vanessa Venti gave a demo on Harvard’s instance of Spotlight, “CURIOSity Digital Collections”. The demo includes a brief overview of the infrastructure described above in the Metadata Harvesting section.

Metadata Harvesting

The item metadata for all of our exhibits are harvested from our LibraryCloud metadata hub and the digital objects are delivered from our Digital Repository Service (DRS). LibraryCloud ingests record metadata from our source catalogs and DRS, transforming the data into MODS in the process. We use a custom built application, SetBuilder, to create sets of records in LibraryCloud. Once a set is created, we use our OAI-PMH data provider to send that set to Spotlight and/or places like DPLA. For harvesting into Spotlight, we've created an OAI-PMH Spotlight plugin that has been released as open source. The LibraryCloud Infrastructure Diagram shows how the pieces of our architecture work together.

Service Model: CURIOSity at Harvard

Eligibility and Partnerships

CURIOSity is a centrally supported service for creating digital exhibits within the Harvard Library community. Faculty and students may participate, but must partner with a Harvard Library staff member who serves as the exhibit’s long-term steward. The steward is responsible for guiding curatorial decisions, particularly when materials require cataloging or digitization.

Intake and Project Planning

New projects typically begin with a consultation for requestors who have not previously worked with the service. This conversation introduces the service, outlines expectations, and helps determine whether Spotlight is an appropriate platform.

Requestors then complete a proposal form describing the project’s scope, content, audience, timeline, copyright status, and any risks or dependencies. Based on this proposal, the service team develops a project charter and may recommend alternative platforms if needed.

Content Preparation and Ingest

For exhibits that rely on repository content, curators provide a list of items to be included. The service team prepares a review spreadsheet to support metadata cleanup and copyright review.

Items must be digitized, cataloged, publicly accessible, and stored in Harvard’s repository before they can be ingested into Spotlight. Curators are responsible for addressing metadata issues, while the service team works with technical partners to troubleshoot ingest and pipeline issues.

Curators also complete a site template with basic exhibit information, which the service team uses to create the initial exhibit site.

Exhibit Creation and Training

Once the site is created, the service team offers a one-hour training session for first-time users.

Curators are responsible for building out the exhibit, including organizing pages, adding interpretive content, and reviewing items. Curators may also upload items manually, though this is not very common.

Review and Publication

When the exhibit is ready, curators request a pre-publication review. The service team conducts a light review focused on basic accessibility (e.g., headings, alt text, link text).

After any updates are made by the curator, the service team publishes the exhibit.

Launch and Discovery

Following publication, the service team creates an analytics dashboard, adds the exhibit to the main library site for discoverability, and notifies the communications team.

Curators are responsible for promoting the exhibit through their own channels.

Stewardship and Maintenance

Curators and stewards are responsible for ongoing content updates, maintenance, and responding to user inquiries.

The service team supports additions, migrations, and long-term planning, including sunsetting exhibits when appropriate.


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