Located in the Netherlands, the University of Groningen library has digitized a number of its older and special collections and then published them online using OCLC’s CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management Software.

By putting the digital collections online, the library provides the university’s approximately 28,000 students, and other interested parties worldwide, with web access to its more than 50,000 scanned pages, handwritten letters and photographs.

"We wanted a system that would be fairly maintenance free, with flexibility when it comes to metadata and design, and that can run on our own server," says Alie Bijker, digitization project manager at the university library, about choosing CONTENTdm. "And OCLC provides good support and documentation and regular updates."

Available through CONTENTdm, the university provides online access to the following digital collections:

•  Manuscripts by the seventeenth-century mathematician Frans van Schooten,
•  Letters written by Dutch philosopher Frans Hemsterhuis (18th century),
•  Collections of the Biography Institute, and
•  One of the library’s rare collections, 127 fragments of Greek papyri.

This rare collection of papyri is stored in a safe, but is now visible to everyone via the web without risk of damage or wear and tear, nor is its viewing dependent the library's hours and staff availability. [Image: Fragment of Greek papyri. Letter of Isaios. AD 200-400.]

"We started our project with a pilot, to see what working with CONTENTdm was like. We really had to get used to it in the beginning but now we have experience with all kinds of ways to upload collections and make them visible," says Bijker on their CONTENTdm implementation. "Additionally, one of the projects we have planned is the presentation of some medical study collections from the University Museum. It is intended for these items to be rotatable."

The University of Groningen's digital collections are available at: http://facsimile.ub.rug.nl/cdm/

This month, four collections from the CONTENTdm Collection of Collections are featured on the OCLC Web site. The featured collections for February are Morris Swett Digital Collections, the H. Ambrose Kiehl Photograph Collection, Kenneth S. Goldstein Broadsides and New Berlin Historical Society.

Morris Swett Digital Collections Morris Swett Library The Morris Swett Library has serviced the United States Field Artillery School for over 100 years. Throughout the years, our library as accumulated rare and valuable artillery related documents. With the Morris Swett Digital Collections, we are proud to make available these documents full of U.S. Army, artillery, and Fort Sill history.

H. Ambrose Kiehl Photograph Collection University of Washington Libraries Presented here is a selection of photographs from the H. Ambrose Kiehl Photograph Collection taken between 1890 and 1917. The photographs are typical of those found in many family albums of that period and illustrate everyday family life at the turn of the century. The collection traces the Kiehl family history as the family moves from Port Townsend to Seattle and reflect Mr. Kiehl's activities as a civil engineer working in various capacities in Washington State and Alaska.

Kenneth S. Goldstein Broadsides University of Mississippi 18th through 20th-century British, Irish and Scottish broadside ballads documenting social and political life. These broadsides represent a large cross-section of contemporaneous printers. Ballad subjects include drinking, love, Irish home rule, identity, religion, the Napoleonic Wars, and much more.

New Berlin Historical Society New Berlin Historical Society The New Berlin Historical Society was founded in 1964 to preserve New Berlin's history. Artifact collections are displayed in six historic buildings located in Historical Park, 19765 National Ave. The archives contain a collection of images and documents donated by the Swartz family, whose large progressive farm was located in the NE corner of New Berlin. Many pictures were taken at the Cornfalfa farm by the Swartz family to document their best practices as the farm grew and rose to prominence in Wisconsin beyond.

If sports isn’t your thing, maybe you’re wondering what campus life was like at the then Austin Peay State College during World War II. In the March 19, 1943, edition of The All State, students learned the disappointing news that there would be no spring break that year.

“Dr. Claxton has announced that there will be no necessity for a vacation since the meeting of the State Teachers’ Association in Nashville has been cancelled as a result of war shortages and rationing,” the article stated.

Anyone interested in catching a glimpse of what the Austin Peay State University (APSU) campus was like over the years can now use a valuable new tool available through the University’s Felix G. Woodward Library’s digital collection. For the last few months, APSU associate professor of library administration Gina Garber and Scott Shumate, APSU digital services assistant, have worked to digitize and make available all editions of The All State student newspaper. Two student workers, Kyle Nelson and Edd Garcia, also assisted on the project.

“Using optical character recognition (OCR) technology, each word on the page was read and indexed for use in our CONTENTdm system,” Shumate said. “This means that information from every issue can be searched for directly, no need for date or issue number, although those options are still available.”

The Library and the APSU Office of Student Affairs contributed in purchasing OCLC’s CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management Software and server. Now, anyone can peruse back issues of The All State by visiting http://digital-library.apsu.edu.

The first portion of this project, which was recently completed, contains 1,158 issues of the newspaper from 1930 to 1988. The remainder of the volumes from 1989 until the present is being added as quickly as possible.

This OCLC News Item is from the article, “APSU library creates digital collection of student newspapers,” written by Charles W. Booth, Public Relations and Marketing, Austin Peay State University. Published on the web on November 21, 2011, it was used with permission by OCLC. The original story is available from the Austin Peay State University website: http://www.apsu.edu/news/apsu-library-creates-digital-collection-student-newspapers

This month, four collections from the CONTENTdm Collection of Collections are featured on the OCLC Web site. The featured collections for January are Railroads in the Midwest: Early Documents and Images, Rarely Seen Richmond, the African American Women in Iowa Digital Collection and the Ken Gonzales-Day Collection.

Railroads in the Midwest: Early Documents and Images Knox College This collection containing photographs, documents, texts and ephemera--annual reports, published books, stock certificates, and more--covers the early history of railroads in the Midwest, and in Illinois in particular, documents the role that railroads played in westward expansion. Many of the photographs of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy trains were taken by Allen A. Green, Knox College class of 1903. Green photographed work trains, travelers and crews aboard passenger trains, and the engines, cars and interiors of the fast mail trains, and he pioneered the photography of trains in motion by developing a trigger device that allowed a train to take its own picture. This digital collection of images and documents celebrates railroad history up to the introduction of the Pioneer Zephyr of the Burlington Route in 1933.

Rarely Seen Richmond Virginia Commonwealth University Early twentieth century Richmond, Virginia as seen through vintage postcards is a digital collection of over 600 postcard images of Richmond, most dating from 1900-1930, from the Special Collections and Archives of the VCU Libraries. The intent of the collection is to help document early twentieth century Richmond by displaying a unique collection of images of the city. Many of these images include buildings and structures that either no longer exist or have since been altered. The subject matter of these postcards also lends insight into the social and cultural attitudes of those times.

African American Women in Iowa Digital Collection University of Iowa This digital collection of photographs, news clippings, pamphlets, scrapbooks, directories, and newsletters documents the experience of African American women in Iowa during the twentieth century. The collection, ca. 1924-1970, is an outgrowth of The African-American Women in Iowa Project, a collaboration between the Iowa Women's Archives and the African American Historical Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa.

Ken Gonzales-Day Collection Claremont University Consortium Ken Gonzales-Day lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from UC Irvine, and his MA in Art History from Hunter College (C.U.N.Y). Fellowships include: Whitney Museum of American Art, ISP; Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio (Italy); (Latino Studies) American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution; and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2008). Gonzales-Day is a Professor at Scripps College in California. Included in the collection are Gonzales-Day's Curriculum Vitae, images that Gonzales-Day used to compile his art and publications, notebooks documenting his research, and photographs and documentation of art installations.

And administrators are now able to do even more customization to their collections websites, including localizing all navigation and messaging elements into one or more languages (11 languages are supplied with CONTENTdm: Catalan, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Dutch, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and Thai).

In March 2011, OCLC introduced CONTENTdm version 6, which offered a complete redesign for the end-user experience along with new website configuration tools that enabled digital collection administrators to easily customize their collections’ websites without programming expertise.

Now, with CONTENTdm 6.1, end users can  easily download and print images and documents they find in online digital collections. For images, different sizes may be offered for download including full resolution, if stored in the Archival File Manager. And newspapers with article segmentation are now fully discoverable, allowing end users to search for and discover article-level metadata and see individual articles highlighted within each page via an enhanced newspaper viewer.

Some of the other new features available with the updated CONTENTdm include the capability to: arrange the list of collections on a collection’s home page in whatever order makes sense for your library; add a customized collection home page; and group digital collections together by geography, topic or institution for searching or browsing.

Administrators will be able to disable or enable any of these new CONTENTdm 6.1 features, either globally or by collection, using the website configuration tools. This provides your library with full control of the configuration of your unique online collections, allowing you to choose how to best display and represent them on the Web.

View examples of CONTENTdm sites currently using CONTENTdm version 6:

• Pepperdine University Libraries digital collections
• University of Leicester's collections
• University of North Carolina at Charlotte's digital collections

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.

Get more information about CONTENTdm ››

This month, four collections from the CONTENTdm Collection of Collections are featured on the OCLC Web site. The featured collections for November are the Westchester County Archives Digital Collections, the Napoleonic Period Collection, the Alwin C. Carus Coin Collection and Fyke Collection of Afghan War Rugs.

Westchester County Archives Digital Collections Westchester County Archives The Westchester County Archives (WCA) Digital Collections were launched in April 2011 to provide widespread digital access to the unique public records stored in its archival vaults. Includes photographic collections, maps, and some document-based collections.

Napoleonic Period Collection University of Washington Libraries Satirical prints, or caricatures, from the Napoleonic Period, all giving political commentary on events of the period. Fifty of the prints were created by French artists, and thirty-three by English artists. Nearly all of the French prints date from the last two years of Napoleon's reign, but the English prints represent a broader time period ranging from 1793 to 1815.

Alwin C. Carus Coin Collection Hillsdale College The collection of coin and currency was donated to Hillsdale College by Mr. Alwin C. Carus of La Salle, Illinois. The Carus Coin Collection is a large collection that contains a broad range of coins and currency, including coins from ancient Greece, Macedon, and Rome, Medieval English coins, Byzantine coins, Islamic coins, Chinese coins and currency, United States coins, and coins from all over the world, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Mexico, Russia, and many others.

Fyke Collection of Afghan War Rugs University of Calgary This collection contains images and details of 48 Afghan war rugs that were donated to The Nickle Arts Museum at the University of Calgary by Robert Fyke. The rugs date from 2000 onwards. Two brochures on weaving and dying techniques and carpet weaving history and a catalog from a 2006 exhibit of war rugs at The Nickle Arts Museum, University of Calgary called "Made in Afghanistan: Rugs and Resistance, 1979-2005" are also available. A website has been developed around this collection to support scholarly communication and research.

This month, four collections from the CONTENTdm Collection of Collections are featured on the OCLC Web site. The featured collections for October are Mail Art, The Long Trip, Art Festival Programs Digital Collection and Mexico: Photographs, Manuscripts and Imprints.

Mail Art University at Buffalo, SUNY Participatory, democratic, personal and expressive as a form of artwork, Mail Art is sent, given, or exchanged via the postal service. Mail Artists form networks and faithfully participate in them by pouring a steady stream of unique art objects into the quotidian postal system. Rubber stamps, stickers, paint and other material are frequently combined in Mail Art collage. After artistic treatment, items ranging from common postcards to plastic bottles enter into the Mail Art network. The Poetry Collection's Mail Art Archive includes collections donated by The Sticker Dude, Baron and Luc Fierens. It also draws from The Poetry Collection's John M Bennett Collection, The Hallwalls Collection and the general holdings of The Poetry Collection.

The Long Trip Bank Street College of Education The Long Trip is a Bank Street tradition designed to expose teachers to new physical, social and political environments. Beginning in 1935, founder Lucy Sprague Mitchell led student teachers on field trips to sites where they encountered issues of the day such as the labor movement, poverty, conservation, and race relations and their effect on the lives of children and their families. The Long Trip Collection contains photographs from scrapbooks and albums documenting these early Long Trips.

Art Festival Programs Digital Collection The University of Iowa Prior to there being a University of Iowa Museum of Art, annual summer art festivals were a way to promote art and culture in eastern Iowa. This digital collection contains the digitized programs from these festivals. Many of the works described in the programs were purchased for the Museum when it was opened in 1969. Several programs are missing from The Library’s collection, and it is hoped that this digital collection will help us locate the remaining programs on campus and in private collections.

Mexico: Photographs, Manuscripts and Imprints Southern Methodist University Mexico: Photographs, Manuscripts and Imprints provides a sample of the photographs, images, albums, books, pamphlets, manuscripts and more, relating to Mexico held by SMU's DeGolyer Library. Each item includes any information and details about Mexico and Mexican history that are available. This digital collection contains many items related to the Mexican Revolution.

Indianapolis Recorder Publisher Emeritus Carolene Mays granted IUPUI University Library copyright permission to create a comprehensive online archive of the Recorder. The full-text searchable archive is available online.

This free and open access resource makes well over 5,000 issues of the community newspaper—dated from 1899 to 2005 and captured from the microfilm version of the weekly broadsheet—available through the World Wide Web.

The Indianapolis Recorder is the single most important tool for researching the history of African Americans in Indianapolis during the 20th century, says Wilma Moore, senior archivist of African-American History, Indiana Historical Society Library & Archives.

The digital product also provides a new opportunity for the Indianapolis community to help fill in long lost issues of the paper. Missing from the historic record are the Recorder issues published from 1917-1925, and January-April of 1932. Individuals with copies of or clips from the missing issues should contact IUPUI's Jennifer Johnson for additional information.

IUPUI University Library is a leader in facilitating the advancement of free and open access and fair use of historical and scholarly content in the public arena in an effort to progress teaching, learning and research. The library manages its digital collections using OCLC’s CONTENTdm, a digital content management and delivery software that makes it possible to access unique and often fragile historic collections online. The software and advanced search features allow researchers to conduct a full-text search, including searches for personal names, events, dates and more.

Over the past 10 years, IUPUI University Library has partnered with Indianapolis organizations to produce more than 60 unique digital collections. Other collections which include Indianapolis African American history are: The Indianapolis Public School Crispus Attucks Museum Collection 1928-1986; The Flanner House Records Collection 1936-1992; and the Ransom Place Collection.

To explore and learn more about the IUPUI University Library digital collections, Google: IUPUI Digital Scholarship. Once at the site, browse the subject African American.

This OCLC News Item is an excerpt from an article posted on September 1, 2011 on IUPUI's News Center, "IUPUI Library, Indianapolis Recorder Newspaper Partnership Puts 106 Years of Black History Online." It was used with the permission of Diane Brown, IUPUI Office of Communications & Marketing, and Jennifer Johnson, IUPUI University Library's Digital Initiatives Coordinator.

This month, four collections from the CONTENTdm Collection of Collections are featured on the OCLC Web site. The featured collections for September are the Wisconsin Decorative Arts Database, MSU Sports Photographs, Plants of SIUE and the State Historical Society of North Dakota Collection.

Wisconsin Decorative Arts Database Wisconsin Historical Society The Wisconsin Decorative Arts Database documents furniture, ceramics, textiles, metalwork, and other material culture artifacts made by early Wisconsin craftspeople and held in the collections of museums and historical societies throughout the state. The database is an ongoing collaborative project of the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Chipstone Foundation, and the Material Culture Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

MSU Sports Photographs Missouri State University This digital collection includes images of a variety of photographs and artifacts related to Missouri State University's athletic programs. Most of these images were selected from the Ozarko photograph files which date primarily from the 1970s and 1980s. The Ozarko was the student yearbook and was published almost continuously from 1909 to 1992. Additional materials were found in other university collections.

Plants of SIUE Southern Illinois University Edwardsville This digital collection features digital photographs of plant species found on the campus of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE). The images are accompanied by descriptions and scientific information. The collection is designed both as a teaching tool for botany students and a resource for lay-people with an interest in plants.

State Historical Society of North Dakota Collection State Historical Society of North Dakota As part of the Digital Horizons consortium, the State Historical Society of North Dakota has included items from its photograph, film, publications, and map collections that document the history of the entire state of North Dakota, as well as the Northern Great Plains region.

This free CONTENTdm training, which will be offered on a bimonthly basis, will provide new users with information about the fundamentals of using CONTENTdm to manage their digital collections.

The training is comprised of three, two-hour basic skills courses:

• CONTENTdm Basic Skills 1: Getting Started with CONTENTdm
• CONTENTdm Basic Skills 2: Working with Text in CONTENTdm
• CONTENTdm Basic Skills 3: Maintaining Collections in CONTENTdm

Advances in e-learning technologies and an increased demand for online learning now allow us to provide training at greater economies of scale. OCLC is passing these savings on to members by offering free training on our most-used services.

“We are pleased to be able to add this value to the services Members are using most, thereby increasing our training reach and impact,” says Rachel Van Noord, OCLC Senior Training Manager.

You can find out more about the CONTENTdm training and sign up for the upcoming courses at the OCLC Training Portal: http://training.oclc.org/training [to see the list of available courses, look for CONTENTdm under Digital Collection Management].

This month, four collections from the CONTENTdm Collection of Collections are featured on the OCLC Web site. The featured collections for August are Integration of the University of Mississippi, the Frisco Travel Exhibit, Luis Marquez Photographs and the Central Eurasian Image Data.

Integration of the University of Mississippi University of Mississippi A growing collection from the 1962 enrollment of James H. Meredith to the University of Mississippi. Meredith officially registered for classes in October 1962 becoming the first African-American student at the University of Mississippi. Following Meredith's arrival on campus, a riot erupted in which a white crowd attacked U.S. Marshals sent to protect Meredith.

Frisco Travel Exhibit Missouri State University This digital collection includes over 200 items from the various Frisco Railroad related materials held in Special Collections and Archives Department at Missouri State University. This eclectic digital collection is a selection of ephemera, documents, postcards, photographs, and artifacts from the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway Company ("Frisco").

Luis Marquez Photographs University of Houston, M.D. Anderson Library These twenty-five hand-tinted color photographs reside in a 20 1/2 x 12 1/2 -inch detailed embossed leather album dated 8-10-1937. Each photograph is signed and titled by Luis Marquez. The collection was given as a gift to Mrs. Allred after she and Governor Allred visited Mexico in 1937.

Central Eurasian Image Database University of Washington Libraries Still in its infancy, the CEIR Regional Image Database project aims to develop a broad and representative collection of images illustrating the geography, folkways, lifestyles and architecture of the vast regions (or oblasts) of the Russian Federation and other newly independent states of the former Soviet Union which, until now, have been relatively little visited or studied.

The Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI) was founded in 1992 as one of the first state-wide automated resource sharing networks for private academic libraries. Today, 23 PALNI member libraries share an integrated library system and additional resources throughout the state of Indiana.

Kirsten Leonard was hired as PALNI’s first Executive Director in August 2010, to oversee current and future technology and cooperative efforts. With the combined leadership of PALNI’s Board of Directors, its five-member Executive Committee and Kirsten in place as the new Executive Director, the organization embarked on implementing an aggressive, six-month strategic plan to achieve “Computing on the Cloud.” And in January 2011, PALNI began moving to larger data centers and cooperative venues.

“Our goal is to shift PALNI's main focus from supporting an integrated library system to being a leader in library innovation and management of electronic information,” Kirsten adds. “We are investing in shared resources that will better equip our members in meeting the needs of their users.”

Since 2004, PALNI libraries have shared a CONTENTdm license to manage, catalog and provide Web access to unique collections of images and other digitized content belonging to their members. By the end of 2010, PALNI members had created 43 digital collections with more than 56,000 items. Rather than purchasing new hardware to meet the growing digital collections and digitization demands of their members, PALNI implemented OCLC’s hosted version of CONTENTdm in March 2011. Its members now have access to 100 GB of storage and will increase it as members continue to expand their collections.

Kirsten Leonard,
Executive Director,
PALNI

Sherri Parker,
Coordinator of Library Technology,
DePauw University Libraries
and CONTENTdm Administrator
for PALNI members

“For us, moving to a hosted environment with OCLC was significant,” Kirsten adds. “We were going to have to buy new hardware, so it was a good time for us to jump. And the fact that we could upgrade to CONTENTdm 6.0, which allows for greater customization for each of our individual member institutions—we expect that to help with member buy-in. OCLC has been very good at accommodating and taking into consideration what we are trying to do. For instance, we are trying to achieve cloud computing across multiple institutions, but each institution wants to have its own gateway and branding sustained throughout their collections and throughout the search experience of their users.”

“Most of the institutions—but not all of our members—have posted collections,” says Sherri Parker, Coordinator of Library Technology, DePauw University Libraries, CONTENTdm Implementation Manager for PALNI and Chair of the PALNI Digital Administrative Team. “We fully expect participation to grow at a rapid pace as digitization is taking off at more of the schools.”

In addition to reducing hardware costs, PALNI has benefited in many other ways as a result to moving to a hosted CONTENTdm environment. It has been able to reallocate resources from maintaining the system locally to spending more time digitizing objects, creating collections and assisting members in achieving their digitization goals.

“We are currently taking more of a consulting approach to assist members with their digitization projects,” says Sherri. “It’s nice to have a community of practitioners to support members’ digitization efforts.”

PALNI has also restructured its cost-sharing formula to include access to CONTENTdm.

“We have rolled the CONTENTdm license and hosting fees into our base fee, so institutions don’t have to pay extra to manage their digital collections using CONTENTdm and deliver them to the Web using CONTENTdm. This will allow more of our member institutions to participate, and also encourages our existing CONTENTdm contributors to expand their existing collections,” says Kirsten.

“An additional benefit of using CONTENTdm,” adds Sherri, “is that it can be easily integrated into multiple discovery platforms.  It has functioned for a few of PALNI’s members as middleware for harvesting metadata in batchloads from their ‘home-grown’ systems and surfacing the content through their new discovery system. This just brings even more value to their objects.”

About PALNI members’ digital collections
From among the 43 digital collections from 15 member institutions, be sure to check out the Plowshares Digital Archive, which is a collaborative collection from Earlham, Goshen, and Manchester colleges. Also of interest are Marion College’s newspaper collection and Butler University’s Friesner Herbarium Collection, which contains about 8,000 images of ferns, orchids and sunflower specimens collected throughout Indiana. The following PALNI members currently contribute to collections, which can be viewed on PALNI’s website.  

• Anderson University
• Butler University
• Concordia Theological Seminary
• Earlham College
• DePauw University
• Goshen College
• Grace College
• Hanover College
• Manchester College
• Marian University
• Oakland City University
• Taylor University
• Trine University
• University of Saint Francis
• Wabash College

To view a complete list of PALNI members, please visit the PALNI website.

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