CONTENTdm:
New life for special collections

Images from three digital collections of the Indiana Historical Society: Photography of James O. Fox, 1945-1960; Art of Mary Lyon Taylor; and Postcards of Indiana, The Jay Small Collection.

Used by more than 100 libraries, this software is bringing unique materials online and into WorldCat

Until last year, people had to visit the Special Collections Department at the J. Willard Marriott Library to view the Overland Trails and Diaries, the Frank Lloyd Wright Wasmuth Portfolio or the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. Today, however, these unique special collections are traveling around the state and the world into homes, offices, dorm rooms—anywhere there is a computer and Internet connection—thanks to librarians at the University of Utah.

New, digitized versions of the Diaries, the Wright portfolio and the Sanborn maps are now available through the Mountain West Digital Library (MWDL),an online library of digital collections from universities, colleges, public libraries, museums and historical societies in Utah.

Built by librarians using CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management Software, the collections are accessed through the MWDL Web site, which brings together 102,000 digitized items from more than 60 collections at nine member institutions. In the future, metadata with links to the collections also will reside in WorldCat, the OCLC Online Union Catalog.

“We are weaving the unique documents, images, maps and other media items from each collection into a rich fabric representative of the region’s history,” says Kenning Arlitsch, Head of Digital Technologies, University of Utah, one of the MWDL consortium members.

Images from the Frank Lloyd Wright Wasmuth Portfolio, the Overland Trails and Diaries and the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps.

 

The Mountain West Digital Library

Established by the Utah Academic Library Consortium in January 2002, MWDL supports and coordinates digitization efforts in Utah and Nevada. The goal is to provide digital access and preservation for the unique special collections found in libraries, museums, historical societies and other archive groups.

Here’s how MWDL works. Four universities—the University of Utah, Utah State University, Brigham Young University and Southern Utah University—act as hosting centers and run CONTENTdm servers to maintain their own digital collections and to support other organizations by providing scanning and hosting services. A multisite aggregating server automatically harvests metadata from the four host servers and provides the search engine for users. The combined collections are accessed through a single search interface but the actual items reside and are served to users from the four distributed sites.

“We chose CONTENTdm because it provides the essential elements for digital collection creation and an architecture that supports large, distributed collaborative projects,” says Mr. Arlitsch. “It is a highly flexible system that addressed our needs for capturing, indexing, managing and displaying a wide variety of materials, including images, text, audio and video. We plan to expand this model to include additional collections and organizations in order to grow this resource of special collections materials.”

MWDL will soon expand beyond Utah. The University of Las Vegas, Nevada and Reno will become a part of this online library by the end of September. Libraries in Arizona and Idaho also have expressed interest.

The WorldCat link

The newest version of CONTENTdm enables libraries and other institutions to automatically add records of their unique digital collection materials to WorldCat. With the WorldCat link, metadata harvested automatically from CONTENTdm servers is converted to MARC format, loaded into WorldCat and made available to library users searching the OCLC FirstSearch service.

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting Version 2.0 (OAI-PMH v2), an emerging standard for metadata harvesting across a network, allows the CONTENTdm server to function as an OAI repository, making a collection’s metadata available for harvesting.

“This is another step in our ongoing efforts to transform WorldCat from a bibliographic database and online union catalog to a globally networked information resource of text, graphics, sound and motion,” says Phyllis B. Spies, Vice President, OCLC Worldwide Library Services. “The automatic harvesting of metadata for digital objects from CONTENTdm servers will give searchers of WorldCat access not only to the description of the digital object, but links to the objects themselves.”

Institutions using CONTENTdm see the WorldCat link as a means to getting more exposure for their special collections and unique items of interest to information seekers worldwide.

“We have used CONTENTdm to put a large, diverse and valuable set of digital collections online within the University of Washington Libraries,” says Lizabeth Wilson, director of University Libraries, University of Washington, and a member of the OCLC Board of Trustees. “The new WorldCat-CONTENTdm link is very exciting because it provides global access to our collections in the context of the leading library information discovery system—WorldCat.”

OCLC is the exclusive distributor to libraries of CONTENTdm, an easy-to-use software solution that helps institutions organize a variety of digital materials, including photographs, maps and historic documents. Developed by the Center for Information Systems Optimization Laboratory and University Libraries at the University of Washington, CONTENTdm was licensed to DiMeMa Inc. (Digital Media Management) in early 2001 to provide support for the rapidly growing community of CONTENTdm users.

Visit these CONTENTdm collections

Digital Library of Appalachia Members of the Appalachian College Association are contributing materials from their archives and special collections to capture and share electronically the history and complexity of the Appalachian culture. Photographs, artwork, audio recordings, letters, manuscripts, books, pamphlets and images of realia comprise the digital library.

International Poster Collection The International Poster Collection holds poster entries from the ninth through twelfth (1995-2001) Colorado International Invitational Poster Exhibitions (CIIPE).

Teaching with Digital Content Funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, this collection is part of a pilot program to integrate digital primary source materials into K-12 curriculum, and into the educational programs of museums and libraries. The collection currently contains images, posters, documents, maps and stereo cards on a variety of subjects including World War II, Westward Expansion, Farming and Abraham Lincoln.

Early Washington Maps Nearly 400 maps offer rich insight to 300 years of Pacific Northwest history in this collection. Users may zoom in and out of an image to view more detail or work with a full resolution version after downloading the MrSID® viewer.

Postcards of Cleveland A comprehensive collection of Cleveland postcards, numbering nearly 8,000 with the earliest dating from 1898. The collection belongs to Walter Leedy, a Professor of Medieval Art, Architecture and Urbanism at Cleveland State University.

Roslyn Black History Through Open Eyes: 95 Years of Black History in Roslyn, Washington, a collection sponsored by the Ellensburg Public Library and supported by a grant from the Washington Commission for Humanities, chronicles the cultural history of the former mining town of Roslyn, Washington. This new e-resource is part of the library’s local history collection.