November 2026

Expanded OCR Language Support for Specto Starter

Specto Starter now supports OCR generation for a significantly broader range of languages through the Tesseract OCR engine. Previously, OCR processing was limited to ten supported languages. As part of this release, OCR support is expanded to include over eighty languages. With this enhancement, institutions can generate full text for a much wider variety of multilingual content, helping improve searchability, discovery, and access across diverse digital collections.

The OCR language list has been expanded to include all supported Tesseract languages that can be mapped to MARC 21 language codes. Language mappings have been standardized to align OCR processing more closely with MARC cataloging practices, ensuring greater consistency between generated full text and bibliographic metadata.

Share and Download the Current Image View

The NDE embedded viewer now allows users to download or share a specific zoomed region of an image. When viewing a high-resolution image, users can download only the currently visible area or generate a share link that preserves the selected canvas and zoom position. Recipients opening the link are taken directly to the same view, making it easier to reference, discuss, and share specific details within digitized content. For more information, see Viewer Services.

Known limitation: When sharing a zoomed region from a representation that contains multiple files, the shared link currently opens the first file in the representation rather than the selected file. Support for preserving the selected file is planned for a future release.

Preview Digital Resources from Alma in Primo NDE

The Digital Representation Resource Editor in Alma now includes an NDE Viewer link in the Delivery section, enabling administrators, catalogers, and curators to open a digital resource directly in the Primo NDE full record page. When selected, the link automatically opens the relevant representation, allowing staff to review the end-user viewing experience in the NDE Mirador viewer before publishing content.

The NDE Viewer link is displayed when the institution has an NDE Discovery View configured, and the system automatically selects the appropriate view when generating the link. This enhancement simplifies quality assurance and content review workflows by providing quick access to the

Primo NDE experience directly from Alma. Because the link opens the live discovery page, the title must be active, not suppressed, and available in discovery indexing for the resource to be displayed. For more information, see Viewer Services.

View EPUB Files Directly in the NDE Viewer

The NDE embedded viewer now supports inline viewing of EPUB files, allowing users to read digital books and publications directly from the full record page without downloading the file or leaving the discovery experience. EPUB content is displayed within the existing viewer framework and includes reading and navigation capabilities, such as table of contents navigation when available in the EPUB metadata.

Users can continue to download and share EPUB files when permitted. When an EPUB file cannot be rendered because it is too large, corrupted, or otherwise unsupported, the viewer displays a fallback message and provides a download option when available. This enhancement delivers a more seamless reading experience and extends the range of digital content that can be viewed directly within the NDE record page. For more information, see Viewer Services.

Enhanced Physical Item Selection with the New Item Search Experience

The Related Physical Items workflow now uses the new item search experience, providing improved filtering, sorting, and item selection capabilities. Users can search for physical items using additional facets, including library, location, permanent location, publication, item policy, and item status, making it easier to locate and select relevant items.

When adding related physical items, the new search opens in a sliding pane and supports the existing workflow of building a list of associated items. Each selected item is added to the Related Physical Items table without replacing previously selected items, allowing users to continue adding items as needed.

This enhancement aligns the physical item selection experience with the NG design, while preserving existing functionality and improving usability for digital workflows that link physical items to digital resources. For more information, see Viewer Services.

Sort Representations for Discovery

Specto Starter now enables institutions to control the order in which digital representations are displayed in Discovery services, including Primo NDE, Primo VE, View It, and UResolver. Administrators can configure a default sort order at the institution level, while digital resource managers can override the setting for individual titles when needed. The sorting configuration affects Discovery display only and does not change the order of representations in the backend.

The feature supports both ascending and descending label-based sorting using natural alphanumeric ordering, ensuring that labels containing numbers are displayed in an intuitive sequence. For example, "Volume 2" appears before "Volume 10" when sorted in ascending order. The setting applies to both regular and special representations.

Configuration note: By default, no changes are made to any configurations. If a title-level setting is configured, it overrides the institution-level setting. If no title-level setting is defined, the institution-level setting is used; if neither is configured, the existing system ordering is retained. This gives institutions greater control over how digital content is presented to end users without changing existing behavior unless sorting is configured.