We created Spotlights to be a way you could quickly highlight and share your discoveries.

Spotlights don’t have to be of famous people or well-known events. They just have to be something that’s important to you – a document about an ancestor, historical newspaper article, or just something that made you laugh.

Recently, we started thinking about how to improve Spotlight pages.

We focused on making the page simpler, easier to share and providing more source information.

Some more improvements:

Larger and simpler layout

People love bigger pictures so we increased the size of the Spotlight by 50% on the page. Gives greater emphasis to you your discovery. The right column shows who made the spotlight, the number of views and comments. You can also see the small thumbnails of the last 5 Spotlights by that Footnote member.

Spotlighting sets it Free

When you create a Spotlight from a Premium document it becomes free for everyone that visits the document through that Spotlight. So you don’t have worry about your family or friends not having an All-Access membership to Footnote. Just share it.

By the way, sharing that Spotlight is easier now, too. Send your Spotlight via Facebook, Twitter, email and other social bookmarking websites. In addition, you can easily embed Spotlights on any website or blog using the code supplied in the column.

The Source, of course

Sourcing a document is important. Spotlights automatically show, if known, where the document came from and how it has been categorized on the site.

Move your mouse over the source and you will see a search box that lets you find more images from a specific collection and links to browse more.

More to come

Over the next few months we’ll be trying out some additional tweaks to the new design. There are a few items missing that we’d like to add, and a few more we’d like to enhance. We hope you enjoy the updated Spotlights. Here’s the some of the most popular Spotlights on Footnote this week.

We’ve received some great feedback from those of you who use the site and have tried to address the issues you’ve raised.

In the newer viewer, images should load faster, be easier to use and be more connected to the images around them.

Here are some of the specific things that should make image viewing better:

1. Improved “About image” panel contains image details, contributions others have made and an easy way to add your own insights.
2. Combined breadcrumb and browse make getting to other images faster and easier and we’ve added infinite browse columns to make browsing faster.
3. Floating toolbar includes all the old favorites plus fit and fill buttons and a new magnifier tool.
4. Annotation and spotlight displays will only show when your cursor is over them, so they don’t clutter up the image.
5. “Find in image” now searches everything in the “About” panel and any text that was indexed using Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
6. New “Share” options include popular sharing sites and links for embedding images on your own blog or website.
7. Updated filmstrip will show your zoom area, what’s been added to an image, whether or not it’s in your gallery and will even let you move around the image.
8. New next and previous buttons let you get to nearby images without using the filmstrip.

We aren’t quite ready to release these changes into the wild, but there is an early version of the viewer that we’ve been testing with our library users.  You won’t see all the improvements and some things have changed from this version, but you can take the library version for a test drive here.

We’ll post more details and tips for using the new viewer once it’s ready to go.

If you have comments, questions or suggestions regarding the image viewing experience on Footnote, please let us know.

With I Remember you can preserve, honor and share the memories of anyone who influenced your life -  your family, friends, classmates, teachers and celebrities.

I Remember includes millions of pages already created from public records including the Social Security Death Index and WWII Army Enlistment Records on Footnote.  It also includes thousands of pages Members have created on their own using information found on Vietnam and USS Arizona memorials, 1860 and 1930 Census or another images on Footnote.

You can learn more about I Remember here or try it out here.

We hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think. 

Tip:  To contribute to I Remember you need to be registered with Footnote (a free registered account).  If you already have a Footnote account, be sure to click “Already have a Footnote account?” on the second step of adding the application.  That way, you can use your current Footnote account with I Remember rather than create a new one.

View the video below:

Try a wildcard search now.

It seemed to be something that only happened with certain browsers under certain conditions, so it took some sleuthing, but we found a few things that were plugging up the works.

Last week we rolled a fix that should speed up the site for folks who were having the problem.  Most of the changes happened behind the scenes, but there is one feature that we decided to give up in pursuit of speed.  We removed the “Report an error” links that were under each search result because some browsers were having trouble with them and also because it didn’t look like they were being used.

We’d like it to be easy for people to let us know about errors with the information on the site, because we’re eager to fix them.  We appreciate the great feedback from people contacting us or leaving comments on the site about errors that they’ve found.

If you find errors on the site, the best way to let us know about them is to use the “Contact Footnote” link at the bottom of most pages or the “Flag for review” links that you’ll find in the viewer, on Footnote Pages and Spotlights and in other areas of the site.  The more information you can provide about the error, the better.

Often, when there is a problem, people annotate the correct information where it appears on an image.  This is a great short term fix because those additions will show up in search the next time that image is indexed–usually a day or two.  Even after we fix the error, the annotation makes that information easier to locate on an image.

Commenting on an image isn’t the best way to send us a correction because we may not see the comment and once we make the correction, the comment will be out of date, but we’ve received some great corrections through comments and we appreciate people taking the time to add them.

Thanks again to everyone who sends us feedback of any kind.  Without it, we might never have known about the slowness or many of the errors that have now been corrected on the site.  It’s great working with you to make Footnote better.

Connections

When you find images that you’d like to connect, simply click on the Connection link above the image.   Then click on the next image from you gallery or from Footnote.  Choose a Connection Type from the drop down list and add Details about why they are related.  The text you enter for the Details describes the connection so everyone understands the linkage.

Moving Connection Order

If you want to move the images from side to side, click on the flip icon above the Connection Type.

Sequential Order or Relational Order

You may want to link the images in chronological order or in relation to surrounding events, places, etc.

How many images can you link together in a string?  There really isn’t a limit although excessively large groups may be more difficult to review than more targeted groupings.  However, you understand the story or concept that you are showing and hence are the best judge of how the connection groupings are best presented.

Viewing Other Connections

Great!  You’ve made a connection or have found a connected image in your search.   How can you see the other images that have been connected to it?

Click on the image so it shows in the Image Viewer. If the image has connections, there will be a number above the Connections link.    Click on the number and choose the ‘View Connections” link.  The other connected images will then be displayed.

An alternative to searching for an image by title or subject and watching for the connection indicator is to click on ‘Member Discoveries’ at the top of the home page, then on the down arrow and choosing “Connections” from the drop down list.

The list of member connections is shown in chronological order

Choose a connection from the list and click on it.

The results will look like the connection below.  Note that links below the images tell how many other connections exist to that image.  Click on the links and all of the associated connections will be listed.

If you’ve discovered or know of connections that will benefit yourself or others, take a few minutes to ‘make the connection’ just like member “grandmaginny222′ did here.  Everyone wins when you do.

When we opened our doors in January of 2007 we had fewer than 5 million images on the site. Since then we’ve added 2 million images a month and have made improvements to the site. Today you can access more than 42 million images on Footnote. Along the way, we’ve worked hard to keep our costs down and subscriptions affordable.

With challenging economic conditions, the time has come to make a modest adjustment to our subscription fees.

Starting September 1, 2008, the monthly All-Access Membership price will be $11.95 and the annual All-Access Membership will be $69.95 (an additional 83 cents per month for annual members).

To help with the transition to the new prices, we’re inviting users to upgrade to an Annual All-Access Membership at the current price of $59.95.

To purchase an Annual All-Access Membership, go to: http://www.footnote.com/account. This special upgrade offer expires August 31, 2008.

We believe that at these prices, a Footnote membership continues to be a great value and a low-cost alternative to traveling to an archive to access the same records. We hope you agree.

We appreciate your support and feedback and look forward to continuing to serve you.

Best regards,

Russ Wilding

CEO, Footnote

The new search is useful because it provides an effortless way to narrow your results.

It does this by using an approach commonly referred to as “guided” or “faceted” navigation specifically tailored to your search results.

What does that mean for you? It means that clicking on any facet, like a Title or Collection, will always give you results. Many might think this is an easy feature to implement, but it is not. It requires a lot of smart software, better metadata and lots of computing power.  But instead of reading more about it, why not check out this 4-minute introduction:

In the viewer:
Full Screen Viewing: Now you can take advantage of the full size of your monitor when you are reviewing images on the site. Just click the “Full Screen” button in the tool bar of the viewer. Since you can’t enter text while in full screen view (this is a security feature of the Flash player) you can’t annotate, or add other things to the image in full screen, but you’ll get a great view of the document.

We’ve also added the ability to select a specific part of an image to save or print so that you can get just the parts you want.

In search:
On the search results page you’ll find a “report an error” link below the information about each image. When you come across a mistake in the indexing, just click the link, tell us where the error is and what it should be and we’ll see what we can do to get it fixed.

We’re still working on our new search and we really appreciate the feedback we’ve received so far. We just added categories to the Advanced Search page, and we’ll soon add the ability to search within a date range.

For Connections and Story Pages:
We removed a few steps from the process of uploading an image to add it to a Story Page or connect it to another image you find.

We hope that these changes and others we are working on will make Footnote a better place to find, use and share the images and stories that are important to you. Please let us know if there are things you’d like to see on the site.