Further Together with Spotlight: Building an Open Community of Digital Exhibit Creators

Developed at Stanford with the goal of providing a sustainable, repository-agnostic tool for building online exhibits, the open source Spotlight tool has a growing community of users. And this growing community continues to extend the Spotlight CMS by using it to develop content-rich digital collections. As an extension to Blacklight, Spotlight can be used to deliver online content with full search features as well as faceted viewing of content. Coupled with metadata managed in the repository, visitors to Spotlight exhibits are afforded a comprehensive view of digital assets, complete with navigation and deep zooming image viewing.

This short presentation by one of the founding conveners of the Spotlight community will offer a fast-paced, dynamic introduction to: (1) the tool itself, including its IIIF-compliance and ability to interoperate with DSpace, Fedora, and other repositories; (2) current Spotlight exhibits, hosted by Texas A&M, Stanford, Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Victoria; and (3) the Spotlight community, which features shared exhibit-creation resources and policies on its wiki and monthly services and collections calls featuring demos from the community members. Through its Slack Channel and Google Group, the Spotlight community is becoming more of a resource for exhibit development. For those in search of a tool like Spotlight, we hope that the presentation will serve as an invitation to evaluate its functionality and consider joining this growing, open source community. But, by highlighting community resources and structures and showing examples of online exhibits hosted by a range of institutions, we expect the presentation to be relevant beyond tool-seekers.