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Queens College: First library school in the country to teach CONTENTdm
“I wanted to make my students more employable,”explains Claudia Perry, an Associate Professor at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies. So last fall, Professor Perry did something unprecedented. She taught her students how to use CONTENTdm digital collection management software. Her lucky students are the first library school students in the country to learn about CONTENTdm. For some time, Professor Perry had wanted to provide the students in her digital imaging class with hands-on exposure to all aspects of digitization to see what launching an online collection would really entail.
Her interest in digitization began while she was at the State University of New York College of Optometry library. She put together a grant proposal to create an archives of digital images of the eye. “A lot of people at that time used slides. My thought was that we could digitize the images and share our resources.” Although the project was not funded, “it got me started on the digitization trajectory,” explains Professor Perry. CONTENTdm is digital collection management software that was developed at the University of Washington and is made available to libraries and other cultural institutions through OCLC. Professor Perry first encountered CONTENTdm in May 2003 at a digitization symposium organized by Virginia Antonucci, the Regional Archivist at the Long Island Library Resources Council in Stony Brook, New York. Donna Dixon, Nylink's OCLC Products and Services Librarian, and Ron Gardner, OCLC Manager of Digital & Preservation Solutions, had been invited to give a demonstration of CONTENTdm. Professor Perry, who had been looking around for digital software, watched the demonstration and immediately thought, “Wow, this is cool.” She was so excited about CONTENTdm that she approached Donna and Ron after their presentation to ask about getting CONTENTdm for her students. Donna and Ron offered to let her use Nylink’s CONTENTdm training account to teach her class.
Learning about Professor Perry’s class might make you want to go back to library school. In addition to using CONTENTdm, the students learned about the issues that underlie the creation of a digital collection—planning, assessment, copyright, audience, and project management and workflow. They also learned how to scan objects and to use Adobe Photoshop. “I try to incorporate things in my teaching that librarians do in the real world,” says Professor Perry. The textbook for the course was the Northeast Document Conservation Center's Handbook for Digital Projects. “I felt it was an easy document to understand, especially for people just getting started in digitization,” says Professor Perry. Although the handbook is free on the Web, Professor Perry requested permission to use and make copies of it for her class. (see Professor Perry's Reading List) Although Professor Perry only had time to teach two 45-minute classes
on CONTENTdm, the students were very motivated and did a lot on
their own, she says. Class results may be viewed at An unexpected outcome of this class was that one of Professor Perry’s students interned at the New York Academy of Medicine. The Academy had just purchased CONTENTdm just as Professor Perry was finishing teaching her course. Eager for quick results in their planned digitization project, an internship was created. Bernadette Cardona, who works at the Scarsdale Middle School Library and is completing her last semester at Queens, accepted the position. According to Ms. Cardona, the New York Academy of Medicine is digitizing its large collection of pharmaceutical trade cards and New York State Milk Council ephemera, “such as brochures from the 1920's that promote safe milk in order to curb infant mortality, especially in the summer,” she explains. During her internship, her responsibilities were mainly to import objects into the CONTENTdm acquisition station and to enter metadata for them. She said she “found the software quite easy to use” and estimates that she imported and described about 50 digital objects, many of them compound objects. “The trade cards had two sides and some of the leaflets had four pages so compound objects would consist of side 1,2,3 and 4. They were easy to do with CONTENTdm,” she says. She also transcribed some illegible text. According to Professor Perry, it was a mutually beneficial experience. “Bernadette thought it was a great experience and Constance Malpas, the digitization project’s director, thought it was really helpful to have Bernadette as an intern,” says Professor Perry. Just recently Professor Perry notes, someone on the Metropolitan New York Library Resources Council's Digitization Special Interest Group listserv asked if anyone knew of anybody who would be willing to do a CONTENTdm internship. Professor Perry was happy to respond. “Being this nexus of connections is good for my students and good for digitization projects.” Professor Perry’s Reading ListNortheast Document Conservation Center. Handbook for Digital Projects:
A Management Tool for Preservation and Access. Andover, MA: NEDCC,
2000. Available in PDF format at: http://www.nedcc.org/digital/dighome.htm
. Available in HTML format at: http://www.nedcc.org/digital/tofc.htm Besser, Howard, and Jennifer Trant. Introduction to Imaging: Issues in Constructing an Image Database. Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Information Institute Imaging Initiative. c1995. 27 Aug. 2003 http://www.getty.edu/research/institute/standards/introimages/Tbl.html Cornell University Library. Department of Preservation and Conservation. Moving Theory into Practice: Digital Imaging Tutorial. c2002-2003 17 Aug. 2003. http://www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/tutorial
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By
Joyce Rambo
