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CONTENTdm

CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management Software imposes order on the chaos of keeping track of digital files. It is a digital asset management (DAM) system with Web publishing capabilities that allows libraries, museums, historical societies and other cultural heritage organizations to manage their digital assets as well as to place self-contained, searchable digital collections on the World Wide Web. CONTENTdm was developed at the University of Washington at Seattle with input from librarians and archivists. DiMeMa Inc. was established in 2001 to market CONTENTdm to the broader information community. OCLC acquired DiMeMa Inc. in August 2006.

CONTENTdm ingests, describes, indexes, stores and tracks digitized files of all types. It consists of three components: A Web-based administrative interface; a searchable, customizable "out-of-the-box" web site; and Acquisition Station software that is downloaded to workstations (up to 50). CONTENTdm can manage JPEG, PDF, TIFF, audio, video , JPEG 2000 and more. CONTENTdm's Compound Object Viewer can highlight and view individual articles within digitized newspapers that have been specially processed to include article segmentation data.

Collection staff use the Acquisition Station to describe digital files either singly or in batches. When the entering of descriptive information is complete, the items are uploaded to a centralized pending queue for editing and review before being added to a server. A digital file may also be added to a collection via the administrative Web interface, thus freeing collection staff from being tied to only workstations installed with the Acquisition Station.

CONTENTdm comes pre-packaged with the Dublin Core metadata scheme to facilitate the description of collection items. The flexibility of CONTENTdm allows for crosswalks from DublinCore to MARC, VRA Core and other metadata schema. The entering of persistent metadata for batches of digital objects with identical descriptive information is facilitated by the ability to set up metadata templates. CONTENTdm can handle controlled vocabularies, and although CONTENTdm comes bundled with the Library of Congress Thesaurus of Graphic Materials I (TGM1), other controlled vocabularies may be enabled.

The Acquisition Station's Image Rights feature can stamp digital images with electronic reminders of institutional ownership, such as watermarks, text bands and logos.

CONTENTdm enables complete database administration through a simple Web interface, allowing designated users to edit live collections, perform global search and replace operations, create new collections, and customize pre-formed collection queries. Collection administrators may keep their collections unpublished or published on the Web. XML is used for all internal structure description.

CONTENTdm Servers support the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol by functioning as OAI repositories for institutions that wish to make their metadata available for OAI harvesting.

CONTENTdm also allows for collections created using CONTENTdm to be exported into the OCLC WorldCat database for increased visibility at no additional charge (institutions that then wish to export their metadata from OCLC WorldCat into their local systems will be charged the OCLC batchloading fee). Additional-cost options are the JPEG2000 software extension for handling large-format items, the ABBYY FineReader for doing optical character recognition, multi-site servers and a service for hosting and maintaining CONTENTdm collections on DiMeMa's servers.

Features

• Collections created with CONTENTdm can be exported into OCLC WorldCat at no additional charge, thus increasing their visibility in FirstSearch, OpenWorldCat and WorldCat.org.