Hi Harish,

We use CONTENTdm to manage many of our Digital Library collections.  You 
can see them at http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/

The collections we have using CONTENTdm are mostly digitized 
books/monographs, but we also have illuminated manuscripts, hand written 
letters, and other ephemeral.  We are nearly complete in archiving the 
entire student newspaper collection, which we hope to release late fall.

We used Greenstone, which is open source, for our first digital project 
called Digital Bridges.  But we just re-released the project by 
converting it to CONTENTdm.  Greenstone required much too much 
customization and no sustainability, as we wanted to add more to this 
collection.

The University of Utah and the Claremont Colleges both recently 
developed their institution digital repositories with CONTENTdm.  I plan 
to follow their lead with our IR on CONTENTdm this upcoming academic 
year.  I believe it was the presenter at Utah that said <paraphrase>Why 
create a technological hurdle trying to learn and shape Fedora or DSpace 
to our needs when we already know CONTENTdm and have an open API that we 
are comfortable with using.</paraphrase>

Though CONTENTdm is proprietary, the cost is well worth it.  The API is 
very open, the community is among the best user communities out there, 
and the vendor (DiMeMa via OCLC) is very receptive and responsive to 
user concerns and enhancement suggestions.

It has a very intuitive metadata interface, and is easy to administer on 
the server side.  I never have to worry about it.

I would HIGHLY recommend CONTENTdm.  Well worth the price!

Cheers,
Tim


Tim McGeary
Senior Systems Specialist
Lehigh University
610-758-4998
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Google Talk: timmcgeary
Yahoo IM: timmcgeary

Harish Maringanti wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've heard of Contentdm from OCLC that many institutions are using to manage
> their digital collections. If you are using Contentdm would you mind sharing
> some of the pros & cons of using it (either to the group or off the list).
> 
> Are there any other viable products either commercial or open source that
> can be considered to manage digital collections. Particularly in the open
> source domain are there any good applications to manage image collections?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Harish
> 
> 
> Harish Maringanti
> Systems Analyst
> K-State Libraries
> (785)532-3261
>