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No.18
ISSN: 1559-0011
May 2011

Contents

President’s Report

Innovation Gaps

Perceptions of Libraries, 2010

Global Council extends reach to South America

MapFAST

New life for special collections

Discovery to delivery in Denmark

A Web presence for small libraries

Member benefit statistics

By the numbers

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The simple way to bring new life to your special collections

Newly redesigned CONTENTdm makes digital content discovery and management even easier

By Bob Murphy

The OCLC cooperative recently released a new version of its CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management Software, which enables libraries to store, manage and deliver rare materials and special collections to the Web.

CONTENTdm 6 is a complete redesign of the end-user experience and provides new configuration tools that enable digital collection administrators to easily customize their collections’ websites without any programming skills. The upgrade is available for free to existing CONTENTdm licensees from the CONTENTdm User Support Center. Libraries that use the hosted version of CONTENTdm will immediately see the new features and enhancements. New subscribers can request a free 60-day evaluation of the software.

The University of Leicester, one of the libraries that tested CONTENTdm 6, is using the new software to build a digital collection of local history and cultural resources. CONTENTdm was selected over open-source alternatives to manage the digital archive because of its rich functionality, including full-text searching, faceted search results and the upcoming availability of Web 2.0 services, such as social tagging, user comments and ratings.

“CONTENTdm 6 is a great step forward,” says Edward Kirkland, Project Manager, My Leicestershire Digital Archive,University of Leicester. “Using the new website configuration tools made it really simple and quick to customize our digital archive; I probably only needed a couple of hours’ work.

“And avoiding coding is really handy for sites like us with no inhouse technical support. The long-term sustainability of our CONTENTdm instance is much more assured knowing that minimal technical input is required from our end.”

“Out-of-the-box CONTENTdm is the easiest and most flexible content management system around,” says long-time user Michele Reilly, Digital Projects Program Director, University of Houston. “It takes little or no coding skills to get first-rate collections up online quickly. Also, it is easy to use and easy to teach others how to use. We use a lot of student and intern workers to help us process our collections, so the ease of use was a big factor in our decision to use CONTENTdm.”

Created with a user-centered design approach, CONTENTdm 6 is the result of extensive research and usability studies. Among the enhancements:

A new and dynamic end-user interface offers simpler access to digital items, easier navigation paths, dynamic interaction with digital items and multiple avenues for discovery. The new interface is based on feedback and input gathered from the CONTENTdm user community and in usability tests.

The new interface includes:

  • An enhanced image viewer for zooming and panning, and viewing images full-browser
  • The ability to share digital items (e-mail, bookmark, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and many more)
  • Features that support discoverability, such as QuickView, image carousels and RSS feeds.

New configuration tools provide a quick and easy way to design a website and tailor the appearance and behavior of digital collections—without programming skills or Web developer resources. It’s easy to apply a branded look and feel with:

  • Text, fonts, colors, styles, logo and custom headers
  • Settings for discoverability, viewer behavior, searching and results, and more.

CONTENTdm 6 offers full control over digital resources, as well as their descriptions, access and display. And libraries can store any type of file—from multiple-page documents, EAD finding aids, PDF files and large maps to audio and video files.

Optimized for customization, CONTENTdm 6 also accommodates institutions that have available technical staff to make more advanced and extensive customizations using custom pages, custom scripts, custom Cascading Style Sheets and more.

Other CONTENTdm 6 enhancements include improved search engine optimization and updated controlled vocabularies. It also has a new feature that makes metadata creation more efficient by automatically extracting embedded image metadata. Now, EXIF and IPTC metadata embedded in JPEG and TIFF images can be automatically extracted and then mapped to Dublin Core or Qualified Dublin Core fields.

“CONTENTdm 6 serves as the foundation on which we will build more advanced functionality in the future. OCLC plans to follow this release with CONTENTdm 6.1 later this year, and it will include social features such as commenting, tagging and rating; additional configuration tools and even more customization options,” said Claire Cocco, Director, OCLC Digital Collection Services.

More than 2,000 libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage institutions around the world use CONTENTdm to manage their digital collections and deliver them to the Web.

Images from My Leicestershire Digital Archive, courtesy of Leicestershire Industrial History Society, Rothley Heritage Trust & Colin Hyde.

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