Hi Harish,
We use CONTENTdm to manage many of our Digital Library collections. You
can see them at http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/
The collections we have using CONTENTdm are mostly digitized
books/monographs, but we also have illuminated manuscripts, hand written
letters, and other ephemeral. We are nearly complete in archiving the
entire student newspaper collection, which we hope to release late fall.
We used Greenstone, which is open source, for our first digital project
called Digital Bridges. But we just re-released the project by
converting it to CONTENTdm. Greenstone required much too much
customization and no sustainability, as we wanted to add more to this
collection.
The University of Utah and the Claremont Colleges both recently
developed their institution digital repositories with CONTENTdm. I plan
to follow their lead with our IR on CONTENTdm this upcoming academic
year. I believe it was the presenter at Utah that said <paraphrase>Why
create a technological hurdle trying to learn and shape Fedora or DSpace
to our needs when we already know CONTENTdm and have an open API that we
are comfortable with using.</paraphrase>
Though CONTENTdm is proprietary, the cost is well worth it. The API is
very open, the community is among the best user communities out there,
and the vendor (DiMeMa via OCLC) is very receptive and responsive to
user concerns and enhancement suggestions.
It has a very intuitive metadata interface, and is easy to administer on
the server side. I never have to worry about it.
I would HIGHLY recommend CONTENTdm. Well worth the price!
Cheers,
Tim
Tim McGeary
Senior Systems Specialist
Lehigh University
610-758-4998
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Google Talk: timmcgeary
Yahoo IM: timmcgeary
Harish Maringanti wrote:
Hi all,
I've heard of Contentdm from OCLC that many institutions are using to manage
their digital collections. If you are using Contentdm would you mind sharing
some of the pros & cons of using it (either to the group or off the list).
Are there any other viable products either commercial or open source that
can be considered to manage digital collections. Particularly in the open
source domain are there any good applications to manage image collections?
Thanks in advance,
Harish
Harish Maringanti
Systems Analyst
K-State Libraries
(785)532-3261
