MDCH is excited to be participating in the pilot phase of CONTENTdm's new Digital Collection Gateway. This new feature of CONTENTdm will be a self-service, Web-based interface that will enable us to upload and synchronize our metadata to WorldCat. End-users will then be able to search, discover, and retrieve our digital items through WorldCat.org, increasing the visibility of MDCH collections and users' access to them. Other institutions could also potentially download our metadata records from WorldCat and upload them into their library catalogs.
Yesterday, MDCH staff attended an online webinar orientation session provided by OCLC to learn how to use the Digital Collection Gateway, and to better understand what we can expect during pilot phase testing. After we have upgraded our server to CONTENTdm version 5.1 (more on this in later blog posts), we will start uploading some of our smaller collections to WorldCat. I'm interested to see how the process works, and to begin testing out this new capability of CONTENTdm.
