By Vanessa Venti, Digital Collections Services Manager
You may be familiar with CURIOSity Digital Collections, Harvard Library’s platform for curated, publicly accessible digital collections. But did you know that Spotlight, the content management system behind CURIOSity, is open-source and used by many institutions beyond Harvard? Over the past year, we’ve been working to strengthen the Spotlight community, ensuring that development on the platform is a shared effort with shared benefit, rather than a series of isolated local fixes.
Rebuilding Community Engagement
While many institutions use Spotlight, there has never been a coordinated development effort across the community. An attempt to create a community roadmap in 2019 stalled due to competing local priorities and the pandemic. However, Harvard’s Spotlight 3.0 upgrade in 2023 renewed our enthusiasm for open-source collaboration. This led to a reconnection with our colleagues at Stanford, who originally developed Spotlight but, like many institutions, are no longer able to sustain its ongoing development alone. Recognizing the need for broader community support, Harvard and Stanford jointly organized Spotlight on Spotlight, a three-part virtual summit in early 2024 to reignite engagement and foster collective stewardship of the platform.
At the summit, we:
- Shared Harvard’s enhancements to Spotlight, inspiring others to contribute.
- Revamped the community roadmap, categorizing priorities and introducing a voting system.
- Facilitated discussions among institutions to determine shared priorities.
- Identified key themes: Accessibility, Sustainability, and Documentation & Deployment.
- Launched pilot working groups to address these topics collaboratively.
Growing the Spotlight Community
Following the summit, the community called for more structured governance. In response, the summit organizers drafted a charter, and the community established a governing board, with representatives from Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, and Princeton. The board now helps set priorities, facilitates discussions, and supports the ongoing development of the platform. Additionally, two of the initial pilot working groups were formalized to address key community priorities:
- Accessibility & Usability
- Sustainability (covering documentation, deployment, and security)
We now hold quarterly community calls where working groups report on progress and set new goals. Between calls, we stay connected on Slack and through separate board and working group meetings.
What’s Next?
- Stanford recently completed a major Spotlight update, focusing on accessibility fixes, security updates, and system maintenance—laying the groundwork for a community sprint planned for this fall.
- Harvard aims to upgrade to the latest version of Spotlight this spring, contributing our own improvements back to the core.
- We continue to experiment with community-driven development, balancing local priorities with the collective goal of making Spotlight more robust and sustainable for all.
By collaborating, we strengthen Spotlight for everyone while reducing the burden on individual institutions.