April 8 Proceedings

How Future Library Leaders Perceive Their Organizational Cultures, and Why it Matters

Kenning Arlitsch

Keynote address from the 2010 CONTENTdm Midwest Users Group Meeting

Kenning Arlitsch, Assoc. Director for IT Services at the University of Utah's Marriott Library, who oversees many large CONTENTdm collections, will discuss results of a survey designed to discern the perceptions and preferences of future library leaders related to organizational cultures in these times of precipitous change. Many of those surveyed perceive a gap between their current and preferred organizational cultures. Kenning will address these perceptions and how they impact collections and digital projects.

Evaluating the Impact of the Swahili Expressive Arts Collection

Stephanie Davis-Kahl

In fall of 2008, The Ames Library at Illinois Wesleyan University carried out a State of Illinois/LSTA grant-funded study to assess the impact on teaching and learning of the Swahili Expressive Arts Collection, a digital collection of images created by Rebecca Gearhart, Professor of Anthropology. The study asked three main questions focused on the value of metadata, undergraduate student descriptions of images, and changes in student perception of Africa. This presentation will present the results of the study and explore future opportunities for collection evaluation.

Identifying updated metadata and images from content provider

Wendy C. Robertson

Items in a digital collections are frequently not static, instead being updated in some way. When this information comes from a content provider mixed with new materials, the updates need to be separated from the new content. It also needs to be clear what content specifically was updated. Is it a new image or did a single image become compound images? Was metadata added or removed and were these changes in a field that we have also modified? This presentation will cover using Microsoft Excel and Access to find the updates so that the work can then proceed in CONTENTdm

Customization, Web Services, and Storage at Ball State using CONTENTdm

Budi Wibowo

The Ball State University Libraries started using CONTENTdm for digital projects with version 3.6 in 2003. Budi Wibowo, Head of Digital Libraries and Web Services at Ball State, will discuss various projects and the associated challenges, and how they are addressed by customizing or creating new processes built around CONTENTdm. Topics will include custom access restriction, web services for CONTENTdm to interact with other platforms, how to make collections Google friendly , usage statistics with Google Analytics, a unique large file storage strategy, a Mac-compatible(universal) PowerPoint Generator, and other in-house enhancements built around CONTENTdm.

Creating a Customized and Sustainable Interface for CARLI Digital Collections

Kerri Willette et al.

CARLI Digital Collections (CDC) is a repository of digital content created and shared by member libraries of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI). CARLI currently hosts and manages over to sixty-five primary-source research collections in CONTENTdm digital collection management software. The CDC collections are hosted on a central CARLI server with the vast majority of collection items and metadata created and uploaded by member libraries. Collections are made up predominantly of image files. Most collection objects have been cataloged using Dublin Core metadata elements, and contributing institutions are asked to adhere to guidelines adopted by CARLI, including technical guidelines for digitization and metadata.

Up until recently, the interface for the CDC included minimal customizations and relied on out-of-the-box navigation. CARLI and the CARLI Digital Collections Users’ Group determined in 2009 that the CDC interface should be more fully customized to showcase and improve access to and discovery of the collections’ unique content. To that end, a consultant was hired to work with CARLI staff to apply sustainable customizations to the CONTENTdm web templates. The redesign focused on applying the consortium’s local style guidelines while incorporating unique design elements that would meet the functional needs of member libraries and collection users.

Customization project team members will present on the collaborative interface redesign process, with specific focus on how the consortium succeeded in incorporating consistent layout and navigation across individually branded collections without overburdening CARLI staff with custom elements that would require excessive, on-going maintenance to support.

Decisions about Description: Getting the Most Out of Metadata in CONTENTdm

Kristin E. Martin et al.

This session will cover three libraries’ experiences developing metadata standards and inputting metadata into CONTENTdm. All three libraries are using CONTENTdm through the CARLI consortium. Peter Hepburn and Kristin Martin (University of Illinois at Chicago) will begin the session with a high-level overview of developing metadata standards for digital collections in CONTENTdm that take into consideration national, consortial, and local needs. They will present the history and development of UIC’s CONTENTdm data dictionary, which expands upon and merges the CARLI consortial recommendations with local practice and provides systematic mapping of fields to Dublin Core for sharing. Lynn Fields and Mary Rose (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) will focus on two specific and thorny metadata issues: subject analysis and access decisions. The questions they will explore include: how to decide what level to provide subject analysis (collection level, document level, or page level); what controlled vocabulary to use (focusing on LCTGM, AAT, and LCSH); and ramifications of different presentations of geographic headings (precoordinated with topical headings or in separate fields). Cheryl Wegner (Newberry Library) will conclude the session with an example of how working with an outside organization and user-contributed information can enhance metadata. She will discuss how the Newberry Library developed and expanded the collection, “Daily Life Along the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad,” focusing in particular on the decisions that need to be made while working in partnership with another organization and the Newberry's experiment in allowing "social tagging" of the metadata for this collection.

Publishing EAD finding aids with CONTENTdm: Opportunities and Obstacles

Bill Fliss

This presentation would discuss CONTENTdm's potential for publishing archival finding aids created with Encoded Archival Description (EAD). It would be informed by Marquette University’s experiences in the fall of 2009, when the archives created a pilot collection of EAD finding aids in CONTENTdm (Version 5) to assess whether the software would be a worthwhile platform for making Marquette’s manuscript finding aids accessible to online researchers.

After providing background information on EAD, the presentation would explain the process for creating finding aids in CONTENTdm, illustrated with examples from Marquette’s unpublished test collection. Along the way, the positives and negatives of using CONTENTdm will be highlighted. Although the Marquette Archives has chosen not to pursue CONTENTdm at this time for publishing EAD finding aids, it may revisit the decision in the future. Other repositories certainly could deem CONTENTdm a suitable platform at the present time.