CESTA Seminar | Aster & Murphy Kao "'Travel Through Time: Japan'—A Digital Exhibit Powered by Stanford Libraries' Open-Source Technologies"

Travel Through Time: Japan is a digital exhibit which showcases a sample of the travel-related ephemera collected by the East Asia Library at Stanford. Spanning the Edo through Taisho periods, the collection documents a period of much change. The exhibit was created using Spotlight open-source software, in a multi-tenant instance which is hosted and maintained by Stanford Libraries. Spotlight enables the building of highly customized exhibits with easy-to-use site configuration and page building options, alongside robust search, browse and display capabilities. The exhibit is configured to view the images in Mirador for easy comparison to similar images—even those from other institutions, provided they conform to IIIF, the International Image Interoperability Framework. Mirador is an open-source, web-based multi-window image viewing platform with the ability to zoom, display, compare and annotate images from around the world.

Cathy Aster is a service manager in Digital Library Systems and Services at Stanford Libraries. In this role, she manages both services and projects, and also works as a product owner with software engineers, operations staff and designers for the digital library applications she helps support. Cathy is the service manager for Stanford’s Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Submission Program, Spotlight (Stanford’s exhibit platform), and the Libraries’ map program in collaboration with staff from the David Rumsey Map Center. She also manages numerous digital collection projects, in support of digitization and/or digital library content, preserving in the Stanford Digital Repository and bringing to light collections in SearchWorks and Spotlight at Stanford. Cathy spent the first portion of her academic library career as a rare book conservator, later transitioning into preservation program management. Her passion for library and archival collections stems from that foundation.

Regan Murphy Kao is the Head of Special Collections at the East Asia Library and the Curator for the Japanese collection. Regan joined Stanford in 2012 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in Japanese studies at UC Berkeley. As the Head of Special Collections, she directs all aspects of acquisitions, processing, preservation, discovery, and use of the special collections at the East Asia Library. As the Curator for the Japanese collection, she builds unique collections to support teaching and research at Stanford, including born-digital, ephemeral, rare, and archival materials. She is passionate about bringing primary resources into classrooms.