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?