Non-use of ContentDM and other sites

One software that we are looking at is ContentDM, which is a great software for accessioning and displaying digital assets. It is clear, easy to use, and can pretty much work right out of the box. I have yet to come across any librarian who really dislikes the software. The one comment that I have heard, however, is that no one really uses the site. So why go through the effort of digitization if no one is really using the software? Digitization is anything but cheap -- Between licenses and staff, a digitization project can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Cornell, too, published a report evaluating the non-use of D-Space at their university. The whole report can be found at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/davis/03davis.html. Part of the reason for non-use is that each discipline already has mechanisms for publication of materials in place and that their DSpace is additional, operating outside the sphere of traditional avenues.

Librarians are dreaming up these wonderful digital repositories, and companies are creating awesome software packages to host them, but is it all just Library Science laboratory work? How can digital initiatives be made more relevant and integrative into the academic sphere? Blackboard and other class content management and presentation software systems are thriving, because students and faculty have to go to them for class materials. It almost makes sense to grow a repository as attached to Blackboard, as people are already there.

I see now why ArtStor has taken off so well in the academic art realm -- Faculty can direct their students to the repository, add to the population of the image collection, sort and create their presentations and pretty much base classes out of there. I don't know if ContentDM can offer similar flexibility, or if the collections that we are speaking of digitizing have as much relevance to the coursework as would images of art for art history classes.

But it could.

And with careful planning, maybe it will?

Indiana University, My Heroes!

This summer I attended the Visual Resources Assoc.'s Summer Educational Institute for Visual Resources and Image Management (or something along those lines)...

That's how I found out about the Digital Library Program at IU. I just wanted to give them some props, as they do a great job of sharing information about how/why they create their collections to look and function as they do. For example, the Cushman Photo collection (which is in the links of this page) includes a history of the project, including proposals, tech specs and rationales. I think that's very awesome -- helping others help themselves through knowledge sharing. More info can be found at: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/

A Decision, I believe...

So Fedora may have gotten the best of me. I don't think that I want to pursue an open source solution me, by my lonesome, as my one mind blowing project. I really wanted to, in a way, to make myself feel smart -- Now I'm feeling like it would be an overwhelming decision. So... We may go with ContentDM for images.

My hesitations with ContentDM or any proprietary software:

1) Lack of ability to customize and to integrate into the library's website
2) Cost of updates / Inability to stay up with updates, if cost prohibitive
3) Creating a "cookie cutter" respository

I will be learning more about ContentDM next month at Palinet. My hypothesis is:
ContentDM will prove to be much more intuitive and easier to work with out of the box than an open source system. ContentDM will be less customizable and harder to integrate into the library's website, but may be worth the sacrifice, due to the lack of labor that the program will require to set up. ContentDM is making strides in abililty to handle text-based assets, but will continue to be outshined by DSpace or other institutional academic respositories.

I want to keep my hand in open source work to some degree so maybe we will look at implementing DSpace or EPrints for an academic respository of research and writing. The open source community is hard at work deploying cutting edge technologies and programming to make collections more accessible - I think it would be a good experience to have to do some of the original programming myself, and not rely completely on tech support and help lines to get things done...

Archival Certification

Yesterday I found out that I passed the examination to become a Certified Archivist, which means I am now a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists. I find preservation to be a very important component to digital repository building, and I'm excited to become part of the greater good that is doing work for digital archiving.

Oh yeah, and now I can add the initials CA after my name if I wish - That's pretty cool.

I'll add more info about certification and archiving as it relates to digital asset management as this blog develops.

Note to self

Dual resolution images are somewhat of a misnomer if you are going to be using the small image for a thumbnail for a collection. I should make sure to figure out what the pixel width x height @ what dpi the images are displayed for optimum output...

Standardizing vocabulary in Dublin Core

For most systems, Dublin Core(DC) is the lowest common denomenator metadata. Fedora automatically creates DC metadata that can be edited. The program verifies that it is properly constructed DC, otherwise it will not accept the changes. When creating a basic collection based on the University of Hull's documentation, the DC values that need to be present are DC:TITLE, DC:IDENTIFIER (which is generated automatically as the unique identifier [or PID, as it is referred to in Fedora), and DC:DESCRIPTION. What I am going to need to tackle very soon is standardizing what is acceptable entries in each field and notate that in a reference guide -- because I know I can't remember what I just entered for the item before, let alone for the previous collections. Also, for a description, what should be the standard for letting know what an object is? Is it necessary to say that something is a photograph, or will that be inferred? Is there added-value to describing something as a "Photograph of Bibles in a Custom Wood case" versus just saying "Bibles in a Custom Wood case"?

Hmmn...

A new hat...

I have been working for the past couple of weeks with the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (FEDORA) which was created by Cornell and UVA and can be downloaded from here: http://www.fedora-commons.org/ It is an open source software for housing institutional collections. I've been hitting my head trying to set up collections and test out this software, but thanks to the University of Hull's documentation of developing their RepoMMan project, I have found many helpful tutorials. I can't help but smile at the project's name, too, given that my husband and I just watched the very campy movie from the 80s "Repo Man" just a couple of months back -- Could that be more than a coincidence and old school punk rockers are at the helm? http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/repomman/

Right now I've been working on creating implicit and explicit collections. That's what they're really called, which resulted in the collection that I made of my puppy's pictures becoming displayed as "Bichon Frise pictures - Explicit." That will be changed before I run the beta evaluation...

I am not sure if we are going to go with Fedora -- It is very coding extensive, and from where I'm sitting right now, I am the only staffer working on this project. My plan is to work with Fedora for one month, then I get to go to Palinet and learn about ContentDM. I will take each as a representative of an open source vs. turn key DAM and decide which direction I would like to immediately go in for beta testing.

At bare minimum, I am getting the opportunity to 1) visit many online institutional respoitories and see what I like and what they are using 2) Getting to intimately understand Dublin Core, which will most likely be applicable to all future digital asset management work that I will be doing. I quickly am seeing the need for developing standards for controlling what values are acceptable in each Dublin Core field, but that will be one step beyond where I'm at right now...