Laura, 

It is possible to query the CONTENTdm API to retrieve the joined multipaged PDFs created from the separate page-level PDFs. You could write a custom script to do this, but the Move to Islandora Kit provides this functionality out of the box. Running MIK does take a little configuration but for PDF documents it's pretty straight forward. Even if you're not migrating to Islandora, this approach will get your documents and metadata out for you. 

Feel free to contact me offthread if you want to know more. 

Mark 

----- Original Message -----

> I'm hoping someone has been through this process and can confirm my guess:

> We're migrating from contentDM, and have several collections with items
> that were multipage PDFs loaded with an automatic conversion to contentDM
> compound objects. What those look like in CDM are a .cpd file and several
> .pdfpage files, all of which are text files without the actual PDF content.
> I'm trying to track down what, exactly, we migrate for these items. I can't
> see the originally uploaded PDF anywhere (does it stay in CDM somewhere?),
> and we didn't create preservation copies for many of these.

> Does anyone know if I'm correct in thinking that the originally uploaded
> PDF file no longer exists in CDM? Would the thing displayed to users be the
> index.pdf that CDM generates for any compound objects?

> Thanks for any info!
> -Laura

> --
> Laura Buchholz
> Digital Projects Librarian
> Library Accessibility Liaison
> Reed College Library
> 503-517-7629
> [log in to unmask]