Spotlight and Digital Collections at the Texas A&M University Libraries.

Exhibits Site

Collections at Texas A&M University - this is the Digital Collections home page which will link deeper to collections and exhibits as they come online.  Our current test area for exhibits is Spotlight-pre.library.tamu.edu.

Who's Who Data

• Institution
  • https://library.tamu.edu/
• Who are the lead contact(s) this community can reach out to for questions?
  • Service Community: Michael W. Bolton
  • Development: William Welling
• How long have you been using Spotlight?
  • Since 2016, in development, testing and evaluation
• How many people are on your Spotlight team?
  • Service team: Service manager
  • Development team: This varies based on the Sprint
• List or number of published Spotlight exhibits
  • As of April 2018, we only have our test and development collections/exhibits.
• Have you used other digital collections platforms at your institution such as Omeka? If so, do you maintain more than one digital collection platform?
  • We have been using DSpace for digital collections and have made extensive modifications to the system to support this effort.  We have also used Flickr
• Have you used Spotlight to migrate older digital collections? If so, what were the lessons learned?
  • Yes. More information on this coming.
• What Spotlight features do you use?
  • Most features, including adding a locally developed Widget for text formatting.  We do not support logons by the community or bookmarks at this time, but we do use most of the other features.
• 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)
  • We are working this through the Spotlight Services and Collections Community and support the items included in the brainstorming and survey documents.
• What are your biggest barriers to using or expanding Spotlight use at your institution?
  • We are carefully crafting collection and exhibit policies and we feel it important to have these procedures in place prior to opening up the system for collections and exhibits.

Notable Exhibits

• We have several customers in the Libraries that would like to develop collections and I will list them here as we work out the details.

Upcoming Events

• An exhibit of Alice in Wonderland images.
• First edition Stephen F. Austin 1830 Map of Texas exhibit.

Notes, Comments, Observations, other information to share

• Spotlight is part of a much larger Digital Asset Management Ecosystem, or DAME as we call it.  A diagram of the DAME is below.  The DAME represents an aggressive, comprehensive approach to managing digital assets of all times, from images to audio/video.