Summary and Setup

Overview

It’s a common scenario in the social sciences and humanities: that after research teams amass a wealth of texts, videos, and images they then endeavor to make their collection publicly available. Their usual approach involves quickly compiling a spreadsheet or employing some third-party web hosting product (that never truly does what they want) then sharing its URL.

While well-intentioned, such solutions are difficult to navigate, lack useful metadata, and, without a clear strategy for promotion and sustained engagement, drift into obscurity on the web.

This lesson guides you through creating a lightweight, open-source search and discovery system where users can find, explore, and engage with multilingual research materials. We’ll use the Google Sheets API (free) for the backend database and JavaScript (also free) for controlling search and data display on the front-end.

This lesson is based on the authors’ experience developing LACLI, a multilingual search and discovery system for freely available online resources in Latin American, Caribbean, Latinx, and Iberian studies.

Prerequisites

  1. Learners need a Google account.
  2. Learners need a foundational understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
  3. Learners need basic experience using spreadsheets like Google Sheets.

Learning Objectives

Part 1: Ethical and Multilingual Description Standards
Understand how a description standard ensures ethical representation of data and the importance of multilingual access.

Part 2: Building the Search Web App
Create a JavaScript-based website search system that allows users to effectively search and retrieve information from a Google Sheets database.

Part 3: Action Plan for Promotion and Collaboration
Consider linguistic and cultural diversity in the design and implementation of the dissemination plan that works toward reciprocity and collaboration in sharing research findings.

Who is this lesson for?

Subject liaison, digital scholarship, or data services librarians working with researchers in the social sciences and humanities. While these librarians possess domain expertise, they seek theoretical and technical guidance in creating a collaborative, multilingual search and discovery system for their research community.

Dataset

Access the LACLI sample data that we will use throughout the lesson.

Web App Starting Files

This lesson provides the basic HTML, CSS, and Javascript files to start up our web app. To get these files:

  1. Download this zip file and save it to your Desktop.
  2. Unzip webapp.zip, which should create a new folder called webapp.