First bilingual Spotlight at Stanford exhibit published

We are very pleased to announce the publication of the first bilingual Spotlight at Stanford exhibit - Mario Paci: An Italian Maestro in China. Look at the upper right-hand corner of the exhibit, and click on “English” to toggle between Chinese and English.

Thank you to Jerry McBride, exhibit curator and enthusiastic supporter of Spotlight, Xiao Rao for translations of the Paci English exhibit into Chinese, and Zhaohui Xue, Chinese Studies Librarian, who provided careful translation of many key site navigation terms, serving both the Paci exhibit and all future exhibits in Chinese.

Internationalization, an oft-requested feature by the greater Spotlight community, was realized in a recent Digital Library Systems and Services development work cycle. Exhibit creators can now create translations of Home, Feature and About page content in up to 10 supported languages. Translations of common user interface elements are provided for a core set of languages, and additional translated material such as metadata and search facet labels can also be provided by the exhibit creator. Metadata for repository objects is displayed in the language in which it was catalogued. Supported languages include: Albanian, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Brazilian - Portuguese, and Spanish.

Stanford Libraries interest in internationalization for Spotlight was given a significant boost by the Libraries’ partnership with the WSD Handa Center for Human Rights and International Justice, a collaboration resulting in the use of our Spotlight exhibit platform to host a collection of East Timor Tribunals, published in August 2018. The Virtual Tribunals digital exhibit is expected to eventually include a searchable collection of public records from international criminal tribunal proceedings from selected countries around the world, from 1948 to present.  

The internationalization feature was designed and developed in Winter 2018, and launched in May 2018. Internationalization capability was released in Spotlight core code, meaning that any institution running an instance of Spotlight can now benefit from the feature. Institutions hosting Spotlight instances include the University of Victoria, Cornell, Harvard, Tufts, UC Berkeley and more. DLSS team members included: M.A. Matienzo, Gary Geisler, Chris Beer, Drew Winget, Camille Villa, Jessie Keck, Jack Reed, Rob Smith, Cathy Aster, and Stuart Snydman.

For anyone interested in creating a version of an existing exhibit in one of the 10 supported languages, or a new bilingual or multilingual exhibit, please reach out to the Spotlight at Stanford service team.