>>> Harish Maringanti <[log in to unmask]> 07/17/08 9:17 AM >>>
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?

Hello Harish,

We used to use CONTENTdm here at CWU. IMO, and I hope I don't step on too many toes here, CONTENTdm is ridiculous unless you just have money to burn. Even so, I just don't see how they can charge so much for their software... every year. Yes, it cost us about $15,000 PER YEAR. And to add insult to injury, they limit how many items you can have in your collections, (unless you want to pay even more) upgrades required hand altering code (!!) and their support could be rivaled by any good Open Source application's community. It's mosty just a PHP app.

My boss told me to check out Dspace and Greenstone. I didn't do too much with Dspace, but I stuck with learning Greenstone. Greenstone is open source and, you guessed it, free. It's somewhat strange, it has a moderate learning curve, the documentation can take some sifting through, but again - it's free. After becoming intimate with the workings of Greenstone, I wrote a perl script that took the data from CONTENTdm and put it into Greenstone's metadata.xml format. Our Greenstone digital archives does basically the same job as our CONTENTdm one did. Bang-for-buck, I don't see any reason to use CONTENTdm for *our* needs ever again.

Also, Greenstone does a lot more than just simple image collections. It has plugins to process other kinds of documents and different ways to display them. Here is our digital archives:

   http://digital.lib.cwu.edu

I have often though I should write my own open source digital archives software, using perl or php and a MySQL database. I wish I had the time! :D Neither Greenstone or CONTENTdm use a relational database. I've often wondered why?

Gavin Spomer
Systems Programmer
Brooks Library
Central Washington University