The Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) PURL pages have a new look and loads of new, compelling functionality. If you deposit content to the SDR, or if you write about content in the SDR, or if you help users of SUL's digital collections, then you will definitely want to read on!

In many respects, an SDR PURL represents the crux of our digital library, providing a persistent, citable, online location for digital resources archived in SUL’s preservation repository.  It makes good sense to supplement a PURL's fundamental utility with the same graceful design and interactive features users have come to appreciate in SearchWorks.

The most noticeable change is the introduction of the embed viewer, featured prominently at the top of each PURL page along with the associated description and other metadata, providing an overall more consistent display of our increasingly diverse digital repository content. See, for example, this PURL page featuring a viewer with a cool image that was recently accessioned into the Bob Fitch collection. 

The new widget enables a user to embed not just a link but a direct view of SDR content placed anywhere else on the web, such as a blog post or web site. This functionality offers much potential for integrating links to SUL’s digital resources in a highly visually-engaging manner, promoting the content and inviting other users to explore it. We believe this feature will be of particular interest to those Stanford faculty, students, and researchers who deposit their work in the SDR, and so we created a video screencast for users like these, explaining how to embed one’s content. Check out the short video and share it broadly!  By following the video's instructions -- plus adjusting the viewer's width (to 455px) and height (to 495px) so that it fits in our narrow blog space and by setting the blog's text format to "Full HTML" -- I was able to embed the same cool image right here:

Notice if you click the information icon (white circle with "i"), the PURL link, copyright statement and use and reproduction statement are revealed.

Other noteworthy features of this latest release of the embed viewer include:

• Support for interactive views of geospatial data
• Support for interactive views of web archive seed records
• Better user interactions for images, with keyboard controls and support for two-page views
• Responsiveness to different screen sizes and mobile devices; try this one on your phone or tablet
• Compliance with web accessibility guidelines.

If you have any questions about the embed viewer or SDR PURLs in general, please send us a note using the Feedback link in the upper right corner of any PURL page. Happy embedding!