Digital Collections Made Easy and Findable
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
I worked at The Chicago Public Library for almost 20 years, so I was interested to stumble across the fact that Digital Collections at The Chicago Public Library is one of OCLC’s CONTENTdm Featured Collections for November. CONTENTdm was new to me until I went to the OCLC site and learned more about it. In a nutshell, “organizations worldwide are using CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management Software to create thousands of outstanding digital collections and to provide easy access to their unique holdings. ” Libraries and other institutions can use the software to create, organize, and deliver collections including documents, images, audio and video files, PDFs, and, more. At the other end, researchers can browse and search the collections and save favorites. For maximum Web visibility, libraries can upload their metadata to the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway.
Among the nearly 600 collections that are now available are the University of Washington Libraries’ Architecture of the Pacific Northwest, University of Iowa’s Curtis Botanical Images Collection, the State Library of North Carolina’s History of Malaria in North Carolina Collection, and Hudson River Valley Heritage, a cooperative venture of several libraries and organizations in Southeastern New York.
You can view a CONTENTdm demo here.
