Case Study: basic digital archive
In this scenario, a group wants to assemble and present photographs, primary documents, newspaper clippings, and oral and written narratives. They have some material already created in collection management software, but expected to add additional material directly into the application.
To quickly evaluate spotlight, they use Docker and the docker-spotlight bundle to spin up a new Spotlight application. The generated application is bare-bones and only supports item uploads with exhibit-specific fields.
In addition to a file and a title, (out-of-the-box) Spotlight offers three default fields for exhibit-specific items: description, attribution and date.
The curator decides two additional fields would be useful for evaluating Spotlight. They create a field for "Narrative type", and make it a "controlled vocabulary" field. This will allow the value to show up as facets on the home page and as part of the search experience.
The curator also adds a location field, leaving it as a free-form text field for now, and hoping to automatically process the data into machine-readable geographies in the future.