New life for special collections

CONTENTdm opens global archives with addition of Unicode

By David M. Duke

No matter what your digital collection contains—from oneof-a-kind historical photographs to manuscripts, newspapers, maps, audio and video files—CONTENTdm provides a set of tools to store, manage and deliver your rare materials to the Web.

But what if your collection contains rare Chinese documents, Hebrew newspapers or films from Greece or Hong Kong? The metadata describing these artifacts may well have been created using scripts that cannot be searched by programs created with Western characters.

The soon-to-be-released CONTENTdm 5 will fully support Unicode, an industry standard that allows computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems. This ability will greatly expand CONTENTdm’s global reach and enable additional important collections to be fully searchable.

User-tested at Simon Fraser University

Thanks to a grant from Canada’s Department of Heritage Partnership Fund for a Multicultural Canada digitization initiative, early beta testing of CONTENTdm 5 with Unicode began at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in British Columbia, Canada, in October 2007.

“We used a group of Chinese-language newspapers for the tests,” says Mark Jordan, Head of Library Systems at W.C.A. Bennett Library at SFU. “The first step was to figure out a way to get the newspapers into CONTENTdm, since the Acquisition Station didn’t support importing anything other than ANSI-encoded content.”

Jordan and his team worked closely with Craig Yamashita, Lead Developer for CONTENTdm in Seattle. “With help from Craig we were able to load our Unicode content with some custom scripts.Our data was then ready to test with an early version of the Unicode search engine. Initial glitches were quickly resolved by OCLC allowing us to launch our Multicultural Canada site within the timeframe of our grant.”

After working with OCLC to test Unicode with CONTENTdm, the end result was a fascinating display of SFU’s group of collections known as Multicultural Canada.

According to SFU’s Web site:

Included in this Web site are an extensive range of collections, the majority in a language other than English. The geographic coverage is wide, from Franco-Ontarien newspapers to the organizational records of Victoria’s Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. Material types include audio files, published text such as books and newspapers, unpublished text such as manuscript documents, photographs, and ephemeral items such as identity cards. While most collections focus on a single ethnic group, the BC Multicultural Photographs collection includes images of most cultural groups found in BC.

What does it all mean?

“CONTENTdm can handle pretty much any type of content that a library would like to make available to its users,” says Jordan. “And it means that CONTENTdm can serve a broader range of end users. The new Unicode capabilities also ‘future proof’ CONTENTdm so it will be able to handle new content types as they become common.”

Andrew Wang, Vice President of OCLC Asia Pacific, concurs with Jordan and sees great potential for CONTENTdm 5 to facilitate digital collections that serve Asian-speaking populations. “Since Asian cultural heritages are recorded in Asian scripts, such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tamil and Thai,” he says, “any computer tool that will be useful in Asia must support Unicode. With CONTENTdm 5, Asian institutions will have the Unicode capability they need to offer fully searchable digital collections to users around the world.”

Keep precious collections safe with the Digital Archive

Libraries can store their digital originals in a secure environment with OCLC’s Digital Archive. The Digital Archive provides a safe place to easily manage and monitor the health of digital content, and it provides a foundation for digital preservation of all of a library’s digital collections.

Because libraries can submit their digital masters directly to OCLC, the Digital Archive also functions as a stand-alone service. Whether a library uses CONTENTdm or another content management system, the Digital Archive completes the digital project life cycle, merging well into a library’s existing workflows.

Be a part of the CONTENTdm user community

CONTENTdm users from all across the U.S. join together at ALA Annual and ALA Midwinter to receive software updates from the development staff and attend presentations. In addition, there are four user-initiated, OCLC-supported regional groups that meet annually. They are:

• Eastern user group: Inaugural meeting held July 2008 at Penn State University. Annual meetings to be held in the fall.

• Midwest user group: Annual meeting to be held in the spring. The next user group meeting will be held at Purdue University in March 2009.

• Southeast user group: Annual meetings to be held in the winter. Inaugural meeting was held July 2008 at Mississippi State University.

• Western user group: Annual meeting to be held in the summer. The second annual meeting was led by OCLC Western and was held in June 2008 at the Claremont University Consortium in Claremont, CA.

If you would like to attend a user group or would like more information, please contact:

Geri Ingram, Manager, User Services
OCLC Digital Collection Services
760.931.9313

Images courtesy of Simon Fraser University and Vancouver Public Library

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