MDCH recently upgraded from version 4.3 of CONTENTdm to version 5.1. As has been discussed in previous posts, CONTENTdm is the software we use to create, manage, and provide access to our digital collections. OCLC's latest release of CONTENTdm has some added features that will benefit MDCH staff members working with the software, as well as end-users accessing our digital collections online.
The Project Client, formerly called the Acquisition Station in the previous version, has been redesigned and streamlined. The CONTENTdm web-based administration interface now allows for scheduled indexing and approvals. These changes will further maximize the efficiency of MDCH's digitization workflows, and will simplify the collection building and import process.
OCLC has integrated Find, the search engine that powers WorldCat.org, into the software. This enhances the end-user experience by making it easier to search and find items across MDCH collections. Visitors to the site can use advanced features such as faceted searching and relevancy ranked search results.
Other significant improvements to CONTENTdm include better handling of EAD finding aids, as well as the support of Unicode, an industry standard character encoding system which allows for recognition of text in most of the world's languages, including non-Western languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek, and Hebrew.
We are also still working toward using the Digital Collection Gateway, which was discussed in my previous blog post. OCLC recently added this feature to CONTENTdm, enabling users of the software to upload and synchronize metadata from their digital collections to WorldCat. Metadata records for a few of MDCH's collections should appear in WorldCat shortly. Look for more information in the coming weeks.
