Recently in CONTENTdm Category

Over the weekend, I joined two other library staff members at the CONTENTdm Western User Group meeting in Claremont, CA. The conference was generously hosted by the Claremont Colleges where we could stroll the gorgeous campus and network with fellow CONTENTdm users in between sessions.

This two-day conference began with an extremely content-packed session (perhaps it could have been divided into two?) that included overviews of two digitization projects. Of particular interest was the Washington Rural Heritage project that involved the leadership of the Washington State Library in mentoring small rural libraries to help get them started in digitization. The projects has been very successful in building grassroots support for digitizing content because Laura Robinson of the State Library had done an impressive job of reaching out to the community with information and technical support. The financial support of continuing state library grants help sustain the initial efforts and further build the collections. There was an additional presentation by the Claremont University Consortium about their digitized scrapbooks, and a vendor presentation on large-format scanning issues and challenges.

I came away from the second session thinking about how to structure collection in CONTENTdm, because while it is possible to purchase an "unlimited" item license, there is still a "collection" limit and this has presented problems for some institutions with extensive collections. The main issue is that it can be very difficult to merge collections because you must refer users to a new URL and they may have trouble locating content they depend on. In addition, it can be hard to navigate long, long, lists of collections. Good food for thought as we start to grow our program.CONTENTdm is increasingly being used for institutional repositories, and there was a presentation from Oklahoma State about how collections were transitioned between IRs...yet another data wrangling issue that is a headache, but can be accomplished.

The afternoon was a treat for me, because UNLV's own Alex Dolski unveiled his spatial search tool, ISIS and talked about the shortfalls of text searching maps. There was a general awe in the audience when he demonstrated the searching. It is always exciting to see what can be done by creative and talented developers like Alex and his co-presenter Eric Luhrs from Lafayette College. Eric showed his MetaDB tool and how their organization has used it to streamline decentralized web-based metadata creation.

That's was it for day one and we ended the day with a meal in the quaint Claremont Village at a place called Heros and Legends where you could shuck your peanuts on the floor and order monstrously-sized portions of bar food.

Day two started with an update on the new features we can expect in new versions of CONTENTdm; including: Unicode support, Powerpoint plug-in redesign (works with Office 2007!!), a revamped acquisition station, and improved image viewers. This is all good news as we have been anticipating these changes and hoping OCLC would respond.

The second morning session detailed the University of Utah's, U-SKIS repository inventory system, which is truly a fabulous tool that they are using to manage IR content. The tool allows them manage comprehensive research on publishers, status of author's documents, notes for staff, and archival copies while seamlessly integrating into CONTENTdm for presentation. It was shared that it is a priceless "teaching moment" for faculty on Utah's campus when they experienced the scholarly communication crisis first hand. Often the library's research into publisher policies would reveal that publishers only allow the peer-reviewed (not the final version) copies of the publication or no rights at all and faculty learned quickly about these challenges.

The final session was on getting the word out about digital collections and I was pleased to see that as of our last two collections, UNLV is using all the methods mentioned in the presentation. While, we have not moved into YouTube or Flickr, we do add links to Wikipedia to our content and web statistics show that referrals do come in from those links.

The afternoon was a developer's meeting and was lightly attended. There is much discussion of a shared workspace for CONTENTdm users to create a code repository or to seperate out "newbie questions' from customization/technical enhancement questions. There is also a need to improve CONTENTdm's reporting features and search results (faceted searching was often brought up). My co-workers and I ended the conference with a bike ride around Claremont and up into the foothills of the Claremont Wilderness Park. It was an enjoyable and informative meeting. Stay tuned for next year....

The first ever CONTENTdm Western Users Group Meeting is scheduled for July 23-24 at Reed College in Portland, OR. Although users of the software meet annually at ALA conferences, this two-day meeting was arranged in response to the overwhelming desire of CONTENTdm users to have more time to get together and talk about their experiences, challenges, and successes building CONTENTdm digital collections.

The agenda for the meeting includes topics such as: All Things Metadata, Customizations, Multi-state/Partner Collaborations, and Publicizing Collections. I will be participating in a panel discussion on Workflow Models with Eric Luhrs of Lafayette College and Joanna Burgess of Reed College.

The event is sponsored by OCLC Western and the organizers have set up a Western Users Group Wiki with the agenda, speaker information, and logistics for attendees.

NEW! The UNLV Libraries Showgirls Collection is now available at www.library.unlv.edu/showgirls/

The Showgirls collection documents the unique history of the Las Vegas entertainment industry. Many artists and entrepreneurs were influential in the birth of a Las Vegas icon: the showgirl. Showgirls features unique materials relating to costume design and theatrical productions associated with the history of Las Vegas entertainment.

The collection features costume design sketches, photographic prints, and illustrations featuring various productions and the theatrical artists who created them: including producers, dancers, and choreographers. There are 211 items selected from seven collections: the Donn Arden Collection, the Las Vegas Show Costumes Design Collection, the Las Vegas News Bureau Collection, the Jean Devlyn Design Scrapbook, the Harold Minsky Collection, the Sands Hotel Collection, and the José Luis Viñas Collection. All collections are housed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in the Special Collections at the University Libraries.

Acknowledgements

Collection Development: Peter Michel, Director of Special Collections
Metadata Consultant: Kathy Rankin, Special Collections Cataloger

Project Team:
Cory Lampert, Digitization Projects Librarian
Annie Sattler, Digitization Technician/Indexer
Linda Ittenbach, Graphics/Multimedia Designer
John Fox, Information Systems Specialist
Kee Choi, Web Technical Support Manager
Michael Yunkin, Web Content/Metadata Manager
Hong Zhang, Application Developer

I've just returned from a trip to Seattle for the ALA Midwinter Conference. In addition to having some great coffee and enjoying the beautiful views of the Cascades, I also attended some very interesting programs and meetings.

Some of the highlights included:

New Members Roundtable Meet & Greet, Orientation, All Committees Meeting and Social Hour where I was able to talk with other new librarians from all over the country. During introductions, I was often struck by how many attendees were working as digital projects librarians or on some aspect of digital libraries. This was encouraging and made it particularly fun to network.

LITA Top Technology Trends hosted a panel discussion with four experts (Clifford Lynch, Marshall Breeding, Karen Schneider, and Andrew Pace) to discuss trends in library technology. A few trends were no suprise; the next generation catalog, RSS, web-based services, Second Life, the rise of personal catalogs, and social networking are all very "hot topics" at our library and beyond. Other topics mentioned were digital rights management and targeting content to the ubiquitous (proprietary) iPod, full-text vs. surrogate indexing, the suggestion that a protocal for object reuse and interchange be developed to deal with issues associated with harvested metadata, and RDA and the future of cataloging. Mass digitization was another top technology trend and several of the speakers gave opinions on a future concern for libraries: the hosting and stewardship of large data sets and national strategies for data curation.

CONTENTdm hosted many events; including a Developer's Meeting, a Success Stories session to showcase projects, a social hour at the Pike Pub & Brewery, and the User Group meeting. Conversations focused on the new version 4.2 release and presentations highlighted the CONTENTdm API and the new features and functionality (customizations carrying through collections, ability to copy the cdm4 directory for test/upgrade, and new search functions). DiMeMa and OCLC were also present to listen to our comments and suggestions for further enhancements and improvements (UNICODE-compliant, expanded PDF support) to the software . It was great to see my colleague Glee Willis from Reno and others in the CONTENTdm community.

On Sunday night, I attended the Innovative dessert reception at the Space Needle with some co-workers and thoroughly enjoyed the chocolate, the view, and the company. All in all it was an informative and enjoyable trip!

UNLV Libraries uses CONTENTdm digital media management software to build our digital collections. It is a very useful software that allows you to store and search digital images (scanned pictures, documents, digitized multimedia files, etc.) and build collections in a collaborative environment. One regional project that UNLV Libraries have contributed to is the Mountain West Digital Library that gathers collections from 12 institutions in the Mountain West geographic region together in one searchable database. More information about CONTENTdm can be found at the DiMeMa website.

Last week, I attended the CONTENTdm Advanced Topics training offered through OCLC. This course has been requested by CONTENTdm users to help those of us that are primarily project managers to learn the nitty gritty components of CONTENTdm reporting functions, batch importing of records, and customization of the web templates. The training was informative and helped me to gain more insight into the programming needed to work with the web templates, which was my number one goal in attending. Unfortunately, OCLC's staff has a difficult job trying to teach this type of course. Typically many people work together on digital collections and they often have a variety fo technical skills. Some of the attendees (including Kee Choi from UNLV) were probably bored by the slower pace of this course.

We will be utilizing some of the skills reviewed in the training when we import art slide metadata and scanned images into CONTENTdm from the system Vireocat in use at the Visual Resources Collection in the art department. This is one of the key steps in the pilot project that the Campus Images Group is leading to explore the use of CONTENTdm for storage, retrieval and repurposing of art images for teaching.