Facets is a theme for Wax sites that allows users to browse through a collection using facets, or filters. When we are browsing through a collection of cultural artifacts, we often want to reduce the number of objects in front of us to a small collection that fits a very specific criteria. Faceted browsing is a form of browsing that allows you to do just that using filters you select. In Facets this can be achieved using drop-down menus where you can select the categories you want to browse by.

Besides the ability to do faceted browsing, Facets also allows creators to extract any subcollection that can be filtered by category and use it on any page of the site. We hope this will be useful in the creation of exhibits that focus on particular sub-collections or selections.


Credits

Facets is the team work of Angela Zoss and Alex Gil. During the lockdown, they met religiously for two hours every week. They finally met in real life once the project was almost complete. Facets builds on the work of Marii Nyröp, and the cheerful encouragement of the Wax community which gathers on a channel on the Code4Lib Slack.

Angela Zoss

Angela is the Assessment & Data Visualization Analyst in the Assessment & User Experience Department in the Duke University Libraries. She has many years of experience in teaching and training, predominantly focusing on teaching data visualization to university students, faculty, and staff. She is also active in several open source development projects, including FOLIO and Wax.

Alex Gil

Alex Gil is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University, where he collaborates with faculty, students and library colleagues in humanities research, pedagogy and knowledge production that involves the use of advanced computation, digital media design, and network technologies. He is the lead coordinator for the Butler Library Studio at Columbia University Libraries, co-host of Studio Remote, and co-founder of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research.

Wax

Wax is a minimal computing (minicomp) framework for the creation of static web collections and exhibits led by Marii Nyröp. The project is currently maintained by Marii Nyröp at New York University and Alex Gil at Columbia University Libraries. Wax depends on Jekyll, the static site generator, and a host of other open source libraries and frameworks including IIIF, OpenSeaDragon, Rake, and ElasticLunr. Wax builds upon work by Peter Binkley, David Newbury, and others.