OCLC Western CONTENTdm Users Group meeting

Program overview: Alex Dolski and Brian Egan will discuss the rationale, provide a technical overview and demonstration of the process of creating custom dmBridge templates and utilizing its features. dmBridge is a web application framework that replaces the default CONTENTdm page templating system, enabling the creation of highly customized collection templates from scratch with minimal-to-no PHP knowledge. It provides a multitude of benefits over the default templates including ease of page creation; ease of upgrading; new features such as a high-performance image viewer, RSS/Atom feed provider, comments, ratings, and tag clouds; and more.

Over the past three years, Angie Beiriger and Joanna Reed at Reed College have been working to build digital collections in CONTENTdm for active use in teaching in their undergraduate, liberal arts environment. To date their primary goal has been to provide easy, centralized access to high quality digital images for the arts and humanities. To better support the needs of the faculty and students, Reed has integrated a more streamlined image viewer (based on Zoomify), and leveraged the CONTENTdm API to build a custom application for organizing image sets and displaying slideshows as a replacement for the My Favorites feature.

Six libraries and archives from the Mountain West Digital Library (MWDL) consortium are using CONTENTdm to open up access to their Special Collections materials via Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids. A custom script extracts 35 fields from a set of finding aids in XML and creates a tab-delimited spreadsheet for uploading them into CONTENTdm using the multiple file import option. Inside the CDM collections, thumbnails and XSLT stylesheets customize displays of finding aids for each library or archive. Automatic "x-links" within the finding aids connect to digitized photographs, correspondence, and other archival materials, where available. A central interface on the MWDL.org website allows unified searching of all of the region's finding aids. This method works in CDM4.3 and CDM5. The session will also review CDM5's new built-in finding aid import functionality and discuss possible future directions for handling finding aids in CDM.

Providing access via the internet to digital representations of special collection materials is a form of publication. In this session Gayle will explore three key concepts that must be considered to manage intellectual property for your organization.

How are digitized primary materials being used in educational settings and classroom teaching? The first presentation highlights a Utah training program for teachers that encourages integration of digitized primary sources into K-12 teaching; while the second presention will present a grant-funded project to build standards-based teaching materials into a new digital collection on Southern Nevada. The third presentation will focus on partnering with teaching faculty to create digital collections that are used in the classroom, feature undergraduate student-generated work, and/or accompany faculty research.

Three geospatial interfaces for searching CONTENTdm will be presented: UNLV's adaptation of ISIS, an Interactive Spatial Image Search tool; Los Gatos Public Library's mashup of Google Maps, XML and CONTENTdm; and BYU's adaptation of Mapify.

"What do your digital projects cost?" Lisa Crane of the Claremont University Consortium will detail an approach formulated by the Claremont Colleges Digital Library. Gayle Palmer from OCLC will follow up with a discussion about assuring long-term access to the digital objects and metadata that comprise your digital collections. Gayle will explore three key concepts that must be understood as you begin to develop a digital archive and preservation plan for your organization.